Looking more deeply at the invisible forces that link one human being to another helps us see something even more profound: our brains and bodies are designed to function in aggregates, not in isolation. That is the essence of an obligatory gregarious species. The attempt to function in denial of our need for others, whether that need is great or small in any given individual, violates our design specifications. The effects on health are warning signs, similar to the “Check Engine” light that comes on in today’s cars with their comptuerised sensors. But social connection is not jusy a lubricant that like motor oil, prevents overheating and wear. Social connection is a fundamental part of the human operating and organising system itself.

- Alan Moore

“By engaging in meaningful conversations, we manage to impose meaning on an otherwise pretty chaotic world,” Dr. Mehl said. “And interpersonally, as you find this meaning, you bond with your interactive partner, and we know that interpersonal connection and integration is a core fundamental foundation of happiness.”

- Venessa Miemis

From: Sharing social experience is key to better teams and awareness

Hyper-Social Design Studio Overview

A thoroughly new remix technique: combining a focused UX Book Club idea with Design Studio Methodology. Starting with the book “The Hyper-Social Organization“, participants including designers (service, experience, interaction, organization), creative technologist, strategists and product managers will read the book. On the day of the studio, each partipant will present key concepts to one chapter, having only 5 minutes to do so, with no more than 5 slides in power point. After a quick break, participants will break into teams and explore concepts introduced in the book to a specific business case study and have a limited amount of time to explore, ideate, sketch and deliver innovative solutions to the problem space which is broken into seven separate functions within an organization.

Saturday, Fall 2011 1PM – 530PM

Location: SoHo, New York City

Price: Free, but a commitment is required.

Interested? Contact me

Schedule

100 – 115      Introductions

115 – 230      Lightening Presentations: 5 Minutes, no more than 5 slides (template to be provided) All slides due 1 week before Saturday

230 – 245      Break

245 – 300      Game Storming – Intro to 3 techniques

300 – 400     Design Studio

One case study will be presented – a company with background information on their structure, management, customers, and suppliers. Additional information about the company’s brand and product lines, as well existing customer touch points will be presented as background material. All teams of 2 will break off to take that shared problem space and use design studio to explore potential solutions enframed by their topic area, i.e. PR, Product, Innovation, Leadership, Customer Service, Sales, etc. Each team will, at the end of the time, present designed artifacts of processes, concepts, and strategies to the problem space using the book as the framework.

415 – 5PM     Team Presentations

Post Mortem and Lessons Learned.

Goals

• Gain a solid understanding of the book, especially the SEAMS Framework
• A collaborative exploration of the problem space
• Explore a framework for organizational change addressing multiple vectors
• Design compelling and differentiated product solutions

Considerations

All Slides from Lightening Round will be combined into 1 Power Point deck and socialized on Slideshare.

All Designed Artifacts from Design Studio will be captured and posted online.

Session will be photographed.

Still Interested? Contact me

Background on The Hyper-Social Organization

The book starts with a simple explanation: “Human 1.0″ is the way that people have interacted and worked together for thousands of years. Only recently (the last few decades) information technology has forced people into working in much more constrained ways. Mass media brought the rise of companies that communicated with the masses through a corporate voice, which has had the advantage in telling people what they want and what they can have. Social media flips the mode, and brings us back to communicating one-on-one. This is not a new way of working, it is actually the original way that people worked, it is just that social media allows this to happen on a scale never before contemplated. A Hyper-Social organization is a return to the natural way of interacting, which is why the authors make a compelling argument that it is inevitable.

After the introduction, the first half provides four pillars of hyper-social society:

• Forget market segments. These were just constructs to allow corporations to coordinate their approach, offerings and message to the market. Instead, you need to think about tribes and humans. A tribe is a group that identifies in some way with each other, and will be the most important way of influencing purchasing patterns. Identifying tribes is the secret to success.
• Forget company centricity, and think human centricity. Hyper-social organization can be more personal at all levels, and engage customers to focus on and satisfy their needs directly.
• Forget information channels, and think about knowledge networks. Companies could prepare mass market messages to push through well known channels such as media and events. This communication was the only option that the consumer had, and corporations could control what the public knows. But in a social world the customer already has contacts to other members of the tribe, already is finding out accurate information about your products from others online. Pushing a company line will not work. Instead, share knowledge well, and work to gain trust.
• Forget process and hierarchies, and embrace social messiness. They recommend something they call SEAMS: sensing, engaging, activating, measuring, and storytelling. The processes will be less and less pre-defined, but embrace that, and allow people in the organization to interact as humans.

To be made incapable of burning –  I do fear the fire

thinking of those commandments which I can’t abide,
commandment s of      Elohim that I ignore

For the words I could not speak, I might not at once

un-speak, I would be marred so deeply

as to be G-d and a G-d who does not speak not to me,

and his word I would not speak in his stead,

unrecognizable          Father, Papa

you are all day long in the memory

of G-d to whom, in

obedience, or

cowardice          let me lift up my hands, that they

might be cut off?

Why did you leave?

To what greater purpose?

—or not as  I should, to pray to Him -

my body be made to tremble. to shake in awe,

in that glut of thankfulness

one welcomes a thing long longed for

thinking of love

enough       either an end to grief      or grief

so terrible it is itself        its end

How terrible

the mind is, open

to the world

and yet it will not be shuttered, even

as in the next room a man cries      mercy
and does not mean it—

does not this thing fear no empty fire?

Nor empty desire, this. To be open.

To see Elohim. To feel that closeness.

To feel that…

——————

Central Park West

a broken connection

a thought leading nowhere to the sea

utter a sound, which

has no meaning (to to exhale that name)

or an empty mirror

being or being unseen

body bound in silk to boundary

between / be twain God

&

Nothingness and 96th Street.

you can’t cross the same river twice

you will drown in my pouring out

and * my imperfection is my own

I was pointing –- panting, breathless

I think I was trying to say [something]

rabble babbling child’s meditations on self

featureless faces [] facelss shadows

how defectors to my love factor into

tear apart this frontier trail

they’re the dent in my identity

carnage of our ages    invasion

as evasion of senses, but

I am, I exist, I think.

she sends me SMS, furtive sexting,

as promised

vowels first. Wishing consent consonants,

of those times I dreamed/am dreaming

writ deceptions, then?

mere me than pull of quantum gravity?

the myriad of dancing shadows of what

for thoughts are naught and what we have

a trope atrophying, but not yet,

song to static – sound to sadness

deaf to definition, so more we’ll be.

——————

This Morning…

another broken connection

four times alone this morning,

infinite in her desire

a thought leading, scattered to the sea

utter a sound, which

has no meaning (to exhale that name)

or an empty mirror

being or being unseen

body bound in silk to boundary

between / be twain God

&

Nothingness

you can’t cross the same river twice

you will drown in my pouring out

and my imperfection is my own

I was pointing –- panting, breathless

I think I was trying to say [something]

rabble babbling child’s meditations on self

featureless faces [] faceless shadows

how defectors to my love factor into

tear apart this frontier trail

they’re the dent in my identity

carnage of our ages    invasion

as evasion of senses, but I am, I exist

////

she sends me SMS texts,

as promised

vowels first. Wishing consent consonants,

of those times I dreamed/am dreaming

writ deceptions, desires, then?

mere me than pull of her quantum gravity?

Well, the myriad of dancing shadows of what

for thoughts are naught and what we had

a trope atrophying

song to static – sound to sadness

deaf to definition, more signal

than to noise.

Oh, I quite realize no one here will read this, at least not in it’s entirety. I have resigned myself to this reality, and perhaps the motivation for posting so very little in recent weeks. But once in a while it’s worth testing the waters. I watched “Gothic” today about the ludlum and absynth inspired hallucinatory orgies engaged in by Lord Byron and the Shelleys – the motivation for M. Shelley writing Frankenstein and the phanstasmagoric horrors of a new zeitgeist powered by electricity and magick and I wonder how our new simulations brought about by a new gestalt will impregnate our worldview with such same horrors. We cannot yet know – but where are our Byrons? Where are our modern Shelleys? Should we just resign ourselves to the drivel of modern Emo Punk and illiterate post-new age detritus that seems to accrete across the media landscape of 1000 poetry groups I find, and not a poet to be found?

This media landscape punctuated by sound bites and flag-draped coffins? I really should drink less coffee. Yale computer scientist and visionary David Galertner said that the fundamental puzzle of the information age is “If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about?” But I will pose a simpler question after taking some time off from social networks like twitter and ask: “If this is the age of the democratization of writing and communication/conversation by means of social media, has it increased the quality or on only the quantity of writing and conversation?”

Whispers of my heart
Today fate was a kinder, gentler bitch, then,
repudiating old sorrows. laughter, rebuke.
a catharsis of interstices, fumblings, pitfalls of
holding onto symbols-without-signification as though
you were a rustle of wind through the trees.
tensing the un-certain April daylight:
a cement structure I manufactured coursed by
time-lapse shadows where the mob reads
the image of its situation.
what difference is one more walker in the city?
or voice in this dollhouse?
—————————–Intermission————————–

“Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it”.
– Virginia Wolf

Like all dynamic simulations, Virginia Woolf tells us here, memorabilia comes in four categories: 1) Those that stir nothing in the mind of the perceiver, 2) those stirring one-dimensional images that soon become boring, 3) those that generate unbearable meaningless noise and make the receiving mind unstable, 4) those, severely limited in number, that bring forth a chain reaction of fruitful thoughts that stream into the depths of memory until, if ever, its powers have dissipated by becoming an inalienable part of you.
—————————–End Intermission————————–

Whispers of my heart II

All the world’s a peep-show: store-front reflections—the
rush of pedestrian silhouettes, asphalt curbs, inter-
sections—dry goods hung
from awnings limned against the fractal
sky: these and other signs to be “in accord with the
time” accepting obstruction. This evening,
faces out of the train station
something they are late for and
already rain, already abiding…
in the dark place where you take off the
mask of artifice, as I have.
And the ingenuity of what it does not hide.

1. That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single energy.
2. That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
3. That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.”
Well, so much for an exciting and fresh look at things this evening.
Love is work, a torrent of mind-shifting shadows which suffices for life when one is what?

. . .

For that is one, and a paltry one at that, gift of love, to make even the greatest waste of time’s seam unbearable lightness, manageable. But love and loss should not be my topic this evening. Today, I believe that we are each at war and peace with our fellows, each desperate to decant our shadows in the sun, each Richard IIIs: incapable of realizing our own beauty (whatever there may be of it) we set ourselves amongst the sheep and gorge ourselves, we ravish the herd, and for each bite through pristine white fleece, we hate ourselves.

Today as I walked in the sun, I thought of “narcissism and nihilism.”
“…this vague & dream like world, without love, or heart, or passion, or sex, is the world I really care about, & I find interesting. For, though they are dreams to you and I can’t express them at all adequately, these things are perfectly real to me.”
- Virginia Woolf

Oh but there is relish in it, as fleeting as in our hearts we know it to be. The scent of a musky lover, a woman lying in bed, the taste of the skin, ones own lips on a sweet other pair, there is relish there; but love is now a thing for others, the rich or even adequately well off know only lust, and the bite that sates the hunger is the same that will leave you hungry again, only this time more . . . ravenous.

The near sexual peak and frenzy that accompanies the triumph of one man over another, a sweat and blood-stained boxer standing over the defeated contender, spoojing wildly at the roar of crowd and the sweet iron taste of another’s blood. It is like proving that you were meant for here, for this place, you birth was under a star. You were chosen. Chosen people can’t just wander in the desert, they must eat fresh meat and fuck, no? Taste the salt of blood and sex. Part the blood red sea and eat manna and kvetch.

But, then, what accounts for this? I write. If blood and sex and tears and effort, then why so easy to write these words, mere sounds? No. More. My poet, artist, savant’s wife, sitting in the sun, and I would write (if I were a man, and that man was me):

“She’s leaving, I tremble;
I feel the precariousness of us
and I sense the looming silence.
Without audience
without a single pair of eyes trained on
my careful performance.

Words keep flowing from my mouth
can’t play dumb at all,
I write in this moleskin,
knowing that it doesn’t matter anyway
that even when I lay everything bare
open these guts up to read the signs
there will be no interpreter.

Days turning to months, to years,
stretch from my feet
through rain, bleating sun,
and I can’t help the bit of moisture
in my eyes
and I hope she’ll understand.”
- will e.

We were chosen, chosen to fall into hoofed clammy dreams where there is no slumber nor rest, anxious nights of the pack nipping at my heals and by god they are there, and with one faltering step they’ll be on you, so Run Forrest, Run! Its getting dark out and you better run fast or you’ll be caught out here in the cold and dark desert night, and then you’ll never feel so lonely again.

The sun! Sunrise on a new day brings only relish, no nourishment. Light splayed across a beautiful face nothing but the distant memory of a love once inscribed in our being. So run. and don’t you ever believe that sweaty, heavy man out of the Cadillac telling you you’ll be the next Governor, never believe that god, a little Indian man appearing in your apartment with a pack of fanatics at his heels. Never believe that trusting smile or those cat like eyes. Furtive, lusting, needy little man.

And to hell with all that.

For my part I look into those eyes and say “yes,” and even when the bullet comes I say yes. And when I am insane and violent, I say yes. And what then, when that man comes out of his Mercedes S-class to tell me something, Fox News Punk, this may be an ode to your creator, and I will say yes. The clusterfuck of life may, without undue hesitation, be simplified by the most simple of words, down to a very crystalline fragment of my memory.

Petty curses come too easily from these lips, and too oft am I likely to complain and grumble. Too many hopes have been dashed on love’s shore, and too many thoughts wasted on my own desperate hopes. To these petty curses, I vanquish them, for they are not food for this soul.

Now is the time I either make my destiny with choice, or allow myself to float towards doom.
I promised to bind myself to something that I could not, in fact, catch; now I find I have only netted myself, and desperately I hope to cast such shackles of hopes would ensnare another. Vain hopes, that have brought not but heartache, disappointment. I could sing such songs of love, but I choose not to, rather, and to rather seek in my self the will to sing new songs, to capture my own intemperance and direct it where I may.

I have hurt many on this strange journey of mine, will hurt no more, for I am shamed. Such can be, and oft is, the price of freedom.

“For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles . . . and so good morning . . .”

We are all born into these marvelous bodies of ours, fantastic in their dimensions, their beauty, their sheer potential. And as children we slowly become aware of these daunting characteristics of our forms. We can love, hate, weep, dance, and shout with ecstacy. But somewhere along the line a piece, or two, slides off into murky depths, never to be seen again unless an echo should pierce our senses, an arrow of memory.

Once the first piece falls, there is no stopping the avalanche, and slowly those gorgeous manifestations of ourselves are depleted, the numerous layers of electric flesh fall away.

“He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire,
that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.”
- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

It is a stripping down process, perhaps due to our first realization of the beauty and measure of existence; once it is known it must be reborn. So things fall away, and we are stripped down to the last breathing piece, a sad fetus of little worth, and those around us mock the fetus, or mourn for its brokenness, or simply state that he/she/it/we can’t handle the strain of loving.

Its true.

We can’t.

Because living is dying, it is watching that which we hold so valuable slip away, never to be had again. It is seeing so many loves destroyed, stolen away, or diseased and foetid, rotting away.

I only hope that when I am left naked, stark raving mad, a rapidly fading shell of what could have been, there will be enough breath and coherent thought to bless this life, this god, this place, for not for taking it away, but for giving it in the first place. When I am naked and purged of all earthly things, standing before judgment, I pray to be able to say “thank you” and disappear, yet another echo, another arrow of memory, to trouble and mock what is left of those who knew me.

“To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.”

Such are my thoughts on this evening. Take them for what they are.

A/

—————- Begin Transmission——————————

“The words we call expressions of aesthetic judgment play a very complicated rôle, but a very definite rôle, in what we call a culture of a period.  To describe their use or to describe what you mean by a cultured taste, you have to describe a culture.  What we now call a cultured taste perhaps didn’t exist in the Middle Ages.  An entirely different game is played in different ages.”
~ Wittgenstein (Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (25).  Ed. Cyril Barrett.)

“Speech, as an object of outer experience, is obviously nothing more than a very complete telegraph which communicates arbitrary signs with the greatest rapidity and the finest distinctions of difference. . . . The meaning of a speech is, as a rule, immediately grasped, accurately and distinctly taken in, without the imagination being brought into play. It is reason which speaks to reason, keeping within its own province.”
~ Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Idea. Trs. R. B. Haldane & J. Kemp.)

Nine Abstractions Of Will (Service Pack 2, Version 3.1.0)

1. Concinnity

My words chill in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire. I sat strange enough to alone-start the lens.  Moreover the getting had heart, was a complete and perfect survival.  We made love.  We climbed exploring the packed-in backbone of the books.  Seduction of birthmark an inch from the lens.  From my eye transfixion calls for skills in the hands of those who have gladness.  I read settled in stake chapter.  Coffee is my friend.  My audience was blood, thirst slaked to tap.  Returning to some otherwise virtual space that no one else could claim.

2. Dissonance

Empty signs, signs to learn the calculus I fed on so the street’s parallels wouldn’t rage violence as figures of speech compromised past-picture perfect.  A post-anti only depicted the signal lights blinking yellow.  The mind shed its ions, traced the way an age is told to gauge the rebuilding facade.  In other words, imagine my word-worlds.

3. Concentus

I spoke the hypnotic “listen” — a link to cluster the contour maps territory. To feed apart the sense points, the line, its silhouettes.  Grasping and chasm; wings fleet foot and the poem.  What saves us he said is no vision, no visible control systems.  The isolations know the facts and complex neurons made synthetic.  Hearing choirs, I loop back, the hearing choirs of angels.

4. Diapason

My “Words” are artifice, memory leaks, system faults.  Crucify the tall consonants to build an alpine fire and trace the shapes of the trees with your fingers and hands.  Make the audience rise to a standing ovation.  My crystal house was invention itself, these ovals your birthright — their tridents like dandelions as choir of angels, voices raised in symphonic triumph.

5. Euphonic

The dire wind dies.  brass clasp, glass lines and dusty linens.  Women paint their eyes open on the street of middle ciphers.  Decibel levels of squall undress the deaf pistils and itinerant sun dates your actions from the pages of a done book. Dark hazel eyes, horizons, advancing to cityscapes of revelation  visible beyond the ruckus.

6. Attunement

Racing thoughts in trains, on Acela trains, landscapes pulled away.  I owned more than one narrative able to live in a person.  Could do the invention stories.  Could seduce juries hung on fascination.  Appearance inside the single aesthetic could chance there and it was ripe. Audience of artificial intelligentsia brimming with ironic disdain.  Pronouncements clashing at the console. By nightfall the permissions gave way to unstructured cobalt rules engines.  Internal spheres out for a spin. Moving my lips along the middle range carried the tunes above her  ramparts.

7. Accedence

You slip along pasting the narrative to each [p]age as if knowledge is social tapestry of concurrence. More knowledge against bumping up against contradictions.  Ravaged where anonymity hangs like summer heat in Kenmore Square. Bogged down by cigarette object an oral shape recites dark sonnets.  The elements emit consent. I liked that and bathed in its glow.  Toasted bytes torched by licking blue flames cloaked in vapor and regret.

8. Concurrence

Periodic indian summer the cozier lines meeting in single point. Fried, frazzled, to pull; connive, to push me over.  Hinged legs spread open and tool kit, locksmith for the host.  Coercions shaped a place for the re-mix. Comlink meant mapping, bound the wholes in their synapsed delusions.  Notes on personal convention in lieu of smashing through but in so much feedback a motor motions caution.

9. Perorate

Your kiss seeping you into my thoughts love, I suppose the transformations lacking your dynamism.  Simulated desires burning out the connections over instant messenger. This is my instantiation, my beginning, my relativity.  Reading smoke signals and hopes trailing whispered winds.

—————- End Transmission——————————

John’s Exegesis and Commentary:

1. con·cin·ni·ty [kÉn sínn'i'stee] (plural con·cin·ni·ties) noun

1. LITERATURE pleasing stylistic artistic harmony: a balanced, graceful, polished quality, particularly in a literary work
2. generally harmonious structure: a harmonious structuring of all parts of something in terms of the whole

[Mid-16th century. Formed from Latin concinnitas, from concinnus "skillfully put together."]

The first person speaker has an interlocutor, and she has a mind of sufficient capacity as to understand his words–”cold polished stones”–enough so they can “chill” her consciousness. “The getting had heart”: Emotions run under the surface of the words, somatically marking them, and the subtext is the “merging” of the two communicants–yes, in a sacral and profane sense–”we made love” is a euphemism that points to intimacy and away from the rawness of sex itself. And yet there is a camera involved, a lens recording and capturing all: a futile immortality project of the will, trying to wrest a personal time from the impersonal “world as will” in the Shopenhauerian sense? The speaker explores ideas with his lover, regards himself self-referentially in her as a recorded act, longs for “gladness”, reads, drinks coffee, thinks of his readership in sacramentally consanguineous terms,and then finds refuge in an elsewhere–”some otherwise virtual space”–where he is both velocity and vector, poised in quantum superposition outside of some Newtonian deterministic causality (the limiting factor of all previous metaphysical studies.) The word ‘concinnity’ clearly refers to the parts of the whole that constitute the speaker’s life as a complex of relevant puzzle pieces, each with their own unique value–”Coffee is my friend–”that can be reproduced in words, that as a transparent act of free will illusion can be considered a balanced, graceful, polished literary work, whether the speaker’s words spoken chill or not.

2. dis·so·nance [díssÉ?nÉ?ns] (plural dis·so·nanc·es) noun

1. unpleasant noise: a combination of sounds that is unpleasant to listen to
2. inconsistency: lack of consistency or compatibility between actions or beliefs
3. MUSIC unstable combination of musical notes: a combination of notes that, when played simultaneously, sounds displeasing and needs to be resolved to a consonance.

“This is the tune but there are no words, the words are only speculation (from the Latin speculum.”
John Ashbery, SELF PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR, Selected Poems.

The speaker finds himself out of sorts with the “cultural taste” he finds expressed around himself–he himself is the dissonant note, since he hears so much badly constructed “noise” about himself that has forgotten “the tune but there are no words”, so he must invent “empty signs, signs to learn the calculus that I fed on so the street’s parallels wouldn’t rage violence as figures of speech….” He knew he had to change the language he spoke and thought in, so as to in both an act of will as well as a move out of quantum entanglement, find new ways to express novel nonverbal concepts and expressions. It didn’t serve to criticize the “post” (that is to say, the past) but instead try to understand what “pre” was, an infinity of possiblities. That is why “the mind shed ions.” The poet is busy bilocating out of an exhausted present into a set of knowable imaginal “word worlds.”

3.concentus–Accentus Ecclesiasticus is a Church music term, the counterpart of concentus. The terms were probably introduced by Ornithoparchus in his Musicae activae micrologus, 1517. (Apel, 4)
In the medieval church, all that portion of the liturgical song which was performed by the entire choir, or by sections of it, was called concentus; thus hymns, psalms, mass ordinary, and alleluias were, generally speaking, included under this term, as well as anything with more complex or distinctive melodic contours. On the other hand, such parts of the liturgy which the priest, the deacon, the sub-deacon, or the acolyte sang alone were called accentus; such were the collects, the epistle and gospel, the preface, or anything which was recited chiefly on one tone, rather than sung, by the priest or one of his assistants. The accentus should never be accompanied by harmonies, whether of voices or of instruments, although the concentus may receive such accompaniment. The intoning words Gloria in excelsis Deo and Credo in Unum Deum, being assigned to the celebrant alone, should not be repeated by the choir or accompanied by the organ or other musical instrument.

To speak the “listen” is to focus attention of another, in this case on the “territory” for which a map is necessary: Consciousness extended into poetry from the neural substrate, polyphonic neural response in intricate palimpsest like maps that instantly sample and “approximate” experience of ‘reality, a concentus of speaking (prayer) and listening (meditation) that results in a pre-Simulationist liturgical cartography of the cosmos.

4. Diapason

1. pipe organ’s main stop: either of the two main stops on a pipe organ that control the organ’s tone and give the instrument its characteristic sound
2. range of singer or musical instrument: the complete range of a musical instrument or a person’s singing voice (technical)
3. tuning device: a tuning fork or pitch pipe (technical)

[14th century. Via Latin from, ultimately, Greek dia pasÅ?n khordÅ?n, literally "across all the notes of the scale."]

The speaker appraises his own use of language as performance, especially since his words are third order representations (or maps) of the world–”artifice, memory leaks, system faults.” He sees the nature of the sound of words and recognizes he can consecrate meaning for an audience, as well as “rise to a standing ovation.” His use of words is that of an instrument, a secondary quality of his magnificent extended consciousness, regardless if the self that emerges from it in pulses is both organismically stable in its involuntary systems but also a patchwork of redrafted engram-based versions of conscious activity. Imagination–the bane of Hume–becomes the salvation of a pre-Simulationist Evans, since he realizes its place in the reflexive monist mind, “as choir of angels, voices raised in symphonic triumph.

5. Euphonic

eu·pho·ny(plural eu·pho·nies) noun
pleasant sound: a pleasant sound, especially in speech or pronunciation
[15th century. From French euphonie, from, ultimately, Greek euphÅ?nos "sweet-voiced," from phÅ?nÄ? "sound."]
Reading this passage of a sim landscape and conurbations extant I remember my first perusal of the opening section of Carlos Fuentes 800 page meta-historical opus novel TERRA NOSTRA (1975), a phantasmagoric reversal of reality in a transmogrified fictional Paris that was inspired by a similiar revolution challenging political and intellectual orders, Fuentes’ stay in the French capital during the student riots and civil disturbances with barricades in 1968, that coincided with the publication of Derrida’s On Grammatology, Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, and Lacan’s book of essays. Although that moment of change turned out to be as false and hollow as the counter-culture it critiqued, then enthroned with marginalia substituting for meaning, the similarity is striking because Evans’ has found the language of derangement (as Fuentes did) for the exact moment of paradigm shift: He has caught pre-Simulation seeding itself in thought and redressing language like William Gass metaphor bubbles multiplying faster than Andy Warhol Marilyns, simulating the dynamic creations of possible VRML women marching into Chirico-like horizons toward the sim cities of the future. This ain’t cyberpunk lowlife strip culture as Gibson saw it, but a different sort of imagined future opening up, “beyond the ruckus.”

After dissonance with the inadequate linguistic model comes polyphonic response in the choirs of the nerves, then the controlled performance of the genetic code unraveling as universal patterns in language, thought, consciousness (a universalism that the constructivists who built on the behaviorists tabula rasa model of no interior self–the black box approach of ignoring phenomenology–could only denounce, since it prevented their politically correct templates that start with progressive ideas of gender and race but end with Robespierres and Stalins and reigns of terror and gulags, because they ignore the essentially human bio-patten, the spiral of life). Finally there is a sweet sound, ready for attunement.

6. Attunement at·tune (past at·tuned, past participle at·tuned, present participle at·tun·ing, 3rd person present singular at·tunes) transitive verb
adjust something to something else: to adjust or accustom something to become receptive or responsive to something else.

This is a wonderful pre-Sim concept in the making, I can already see from Will’s use of it here, in the midst of his assemblage of musical notation to conduct a tempest to the score of the stormy self.

The speaker envisions himself in accelerated circumstances, with shifting frames of reference–thoughts racing forward in trains, “landscapes pulled away.” The virtual world permits multiple narratives, not merely double lives, but multiple sprawling strands of self messily played out with as many avatars as possible: The postmodern cream dream. The speaker ponders the consequences: “Could do the invention stories.” Now a re-enactment of Camus’ The Fall: “Could seduce juries hung on fascination. ” The possibilities lead to cybernetic functionalism where subjectivity is absent or one note: “Audience of artificial intelligentsia brimming with ironic disdain.” It’s almost an image of Daniel Dennett’s Harvard populated with very bright zombies. The speaker continues in his sim odyssey to learn more about the “brave new world” he’s entering. He’s definitely ‘willed’ himself into a future vision, but now he has to decide where it branches, divides, forks and bifurcates.

There is a sense of losing control in the last few lines, “The permissions gave way to unstructured cobalt rules engines’” of the humans losing control over their simulations. Who is being attuned. And for what purpose? Is it human evolution if we replicate memes in thought engines that lack consciousness as embodied glog selves? And if that is a future, how do we steer the accelerated memes away from its event horizon?

7. Accedence consent or agreement to something
2. come to power: to attain an important and powerful position
3. sign treaty: to become a party to an international agreement or treaty

[15th century. From Latin accedere, literally "to come to," from cedere "to come" (source of English cease and ancestor ).]

—ac·ced·ence, noun

Another great word in the way Will is using it: He sees self-organizing thought “pasting the narrative to each page” (we think of Burroughs and Gysin, of magickal techniques of editing the world by cutting and pasting your own memories, which are rich recollections of sensory experience but also inferences, hearsay, news stories, a compilation of sources) “as if knowledge is social tapestry of concurrence” (that is to say, if there is no current language game in the Wittgensteinan sense, and the public coin of language’s meanings guaranteed a sort of naive consensus on the knowledge extracted from words.

But the Chomsky breakthrough of universal structures of syntax (and linguistic acquisition) doesn’t imply universal understanding of the same concepts behind different signifiers, this is based on “learnings” that are social and “approximations” of awareness that are conditional to the given context. So, there are limits to language, as well as individual will, in any world we created: “More knowledge against bumping up against contradictions.” The speaker retreats to a personal image revealing his subjectivity is lost in the crowd of other minds, “ravaged where anonymity hangs like summer heat in Kenmore Square.” He smokes, he cathects on orality, and finds poetry in a fetish. He ‘accedes’ to his own limitations self-described, feels the regret in a virtual nicotinized Boston of “toasted bytes torched by licking blue flames cloaked in vapor and regret.”

8. Concurrence
adjective
1. happening together: taking place or existing at the same time, or running parallel
2. GEOMETRY See convergent

Deep in the sim world building (his imagination instantly throwing up new thought worlds translated into word worlds then rendered by rastoring programs (very similar to how one’s own brain creates first-order neural maps of objects for the proto-self, that in turn generates second-order maps for core consciousness to respond to by triggering third order language maps for the extended awareness to finally understand its own reaction–”we are sad because we cry” William James–and respond with memory, will to a new action, or inaction as a choice) Now we are in the realm of convergent realities, where the extended sexual metaphor of the couple dovetails into the elaborate simulated fantasy of self in images like these–”Hinged legs spread open and tool kit, locksmith for the host.”

We are back to the ‘instantiation’ of lovemaking, though removed from the sigil production and release by the speakers resorting to cybernetic descriptions to aesthetically abstract the intensity of the encounter, though the BDSM imagery heightens the power of the interaction–”bound the wholes in their synapsed delusions” , “smashing through” gives way to the safe sign–”a motor motions caution.” Clearly we are talking consensual partners reaching extreme states beyond language for a supreme concurrence, that elicits “so much feedback.”

9. Perorate 1. end speech: to finish a speech by summarizing its main points
2. give speech: to speak at length, especially in a formal or pompous way
[Early 17th century. From Latin perorare, literally "to speak all the way through," from orare "to speak" (source of English oration ).]
We are at the end of the poem as well as the erotic session, and so we get “your kiss seeping you intol my thoughts love….” No subjective idealism here, the speaker is wrenched from his paradigm-shifting reverie back into the body awareness (for isn’t sex a form of forgetting in the merging with the other, and so as we melt as animal forms where does the mind go, particularly a mind as dissipative in energy structure as this genius poet’s?) forgoing therefore any accusations of solipsism, and yet, “I suppose the transformations lacking your dynamism.”

We are back in a virtual world with “simulated desires” and we ask ourselves if this ostensible erotic merging was not just a super-sigilizing through optical fiber from one router-modem to another—”burning out the connections over instant messenger.” What is the literal world, and what is the metaphorical one, at this point in the poem? “This is my instantiation, my beginning, relativity.” Self merging with self after the mind meld, the Einsteinan frames shifted once again, where love is objectively reduces in a quantum state in the mind and the lover experienced as an afterthought, an evaluation of the sharing–”reading smoke signals and hopes trailing whispered winds–” and the personal narrative of the speaker becomes one with his awareness of a fundamental shift in his thinking, into a pre-Sim world where he can envisage “immersion” in the sim worlds while still in the real world with growing mastery.

I might add, as well, that like Alexander Leverenze’s iconoclastic poem Re: Will’s attempt here to characterize his own morphing of consciousness must be tackled on several levels of awareness, and even so at the end of the day another prescient reader may feel as I do: Not that they have misread this text, nor that they have read too much into it, but rather, they haven’t glimpsed the fullness of the poem’s insight literally because it ‘seems’ to be a future object embedded in a present not quite ready to accept what it is proposing.

Needless to say, I rather fancy this sort of world-breaking literary effort, in spite of its difficulty and ‘seeming’ reconditeness at first, because I am tasting now the world I will live out later.

Ole! poeta de las tinieblas que deslumbran con chispas una oscuridad aun mas caido, mas ennegrecido, mas infernal….esperando la luz que viene palabra por palabra como imagenes entrando el ojo en un instante.

~ John.

“All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

The universe slumped in a hammock off Bay Street,

devising ingenious new ways to break my heart,

her robe parting suggestively at her forked and dangling legs.

Between the serene hammock and the storm-gashed spasm of rock where we
cowered as if shipwrecked, certain figures moved into light while others
retreated — they appeared to be elderly women opening and closing side doors
on a long hall diminished by shrinking hooded kerosene lamps.

I did not say it three times; Air, please open, and the air opened.

None the less, we suddenly stood before the hammock and waited to be
acknowledged like self-effacing butlers, which is the proper attitude for
sneaking up on a languishing universe.

Her heart must be approached slowly,

with folded hands, as one approaches a skittish frog,

high dive or declaration of love.

But this is just the beginning, dark lights in Club Rain. Savannah night.

A metaverse in repose can also be a reflecting pool, so I doled out tobacco
and leaf, sat Indian style around the hammock and admired ourselves French kissing and
inhaling.

My loves have proclaimed that mirrors hold their most cherished images
subsurface even when ruffled by wind, shattered by hurled candlesticks, or
un-silvered by time; and each day we discover new things about which
lovers were right when we thought they were lusty vixens.

It was strange that she never changed colors; the tiny husks of phantom
dolls did amass on dark club benches — these were the components of our
new destruction, insofar as we could divine them from the rustling scrolls
of their ancient voices chanting into me.

Whether graven coals with a stylus of iron or impressed upon flesh with a
fingernail, the imbricate after-images of her manifesto, described through
the dimming of variously colored veils, persisted long after their immediate
utility slipped into the abyss between each word in the inscription.

The universe put its hand beneath the unfolding robe and she writhed obscenely,
head falling back, and dark hair cascading in ecstasy.

The sky within was flat and glossy like a photograph of water, centrally
pinioned by two gigantic hands knitting the heavens with worry.

Over the universe’s wild and bucking head, the Divine Barber stropped his
razor and entire epochs drifted into anonymity like beard trimmings.

Jets of steam and the silhouettes of languidly turning propellers obscured her red, flowered beauty, and
all visions.

By the seething radiator, a man who was mainly a dense system fingered his
lungs anxiously.

My lover clucked and hurled her fishnet stockings with startling
dexterity.

Air hissed from my heart deflating.

Attribute the indigo color of blue trees to the blue bird holding you so tight.

I negotiate with myself & low lamp light lithe the backdrop of candles lit,

swinging gently near your head.

Envy me because I’m not a ghost.

Along the scrim, you close in  on the slow,

deliberate hand blackening electricity,

I wear you as a night light, a beacon.

A/

Social search has the potential to improve search practices beyond what is possible with traditional informational retrieval algorithms. Two different models of social search should be incorporated into enterprise and conventional search systems today. Collective Search involves aggregating social metadata, trends, and previous tags, bookmarks, or information shared by social networks. Collaborative Search, or question-answering, occurs when two or more participants actively engage in an information seeking task. Interactions include everything from replying to a one-time question to dually negotiating the query formation and relevancy of specific results to arrive at a shared consensus of best fit.

This talk will frame the relevant models of social search in the context of Brynn’s research, and discuss the potential benefits for both users as well as organizations. We will extend these trends and findings to concrete design considerations that we encourage system designers to consider in order to leverage social search capabilities within the enterprise.

Complete notes and citations were done by Brynn and everything can be found here.

Just got a nice review in EContent Magazine.

Fittingly, the ESS West track ended on Thursday with “Designing for Sociality in Enterprise Search,” presented by Will Evans, director of experience design, Semantic Foundry and researcher and author Brynn Evans (no relation. The duo delivered a highly conversational presentation about social interaction design, or what they call “SxD,” in a truly interactive way. As a team, they explored the various stages or manifestations of social search and provided a graphic look into its potential impact in the enterprise, revealing ideas about a potential engine and how it might work; incorporating things like “friend filtered search,” “social scents,” and even a suggestion box that says something like “You seem to be having trouble, would you like to ask your network for help?”

Syntax, dear friend, writhes as you do;
for to write is to choose at cross-roads — both true

And so I, @semanticwill, begin the “Post(ing) Self-Similarity,” series of poetic tapestry. This all started when I was thinking about pervasive control systems through mediated experience and pharmacology; the panopticon has been torn down and replaced with far more pervasive mechanisms of control through surveillance, mediation, medication; talking points replacing discourse, which started as this piece and a reaction to Adrian Chan’s post “Post Writing: Social Self, Private Self, Post(ing) Self,” and was carried out as far as my brain could free-associate, (if nothing else, perhaps we rip off the skin and peer into Will’s thought-processing (as it reacts,relates to/for), of various discussions on Twitter, and think that) modes of social interaction within the comments on the web 2.0 blog which become art, itself – relational aesthetics – symbolic tokens of signification gifted back and forth. There is an idea (if I break out, I am slip-streaming this evening — don’t expect epiphany here, or redemption, I offer nothing), You know it – I’ve been, perhaps through shear force of will, trying to unlock, accelerate the quality of the author-author inter-subjective collaboration through the intra-comments dialogue because that is where the real juice can be, hopefully, eventually – where a real stress testing of ideas can happen, perhaps, or at least something more substantive that mutual masturbation circle-jerking or mimetic emulating, emulation -  setting each other on fire for some cause,

Dispersive simulation catalyzed
By melding techne with consciousness
Necessitates a new metaphysics.
Simply – technology is not the ideology itself,
as the futurists claim.

Techne becomes invisible, but not in the transition from discipline (panopticon) ala Derrida, to “C”ontrol per se, Techne shorting the distancing further than MCluhan ever thought possible. But more than shortening the distance (some think technology as a distancing tool), but it can provide a mechanism for a tighter integration of ideas, a glass arcade of inter-subjective interaction between authors, objects, pro-sumers in a strange loop. Maybe. Brain stem hasn’t received enough caffeine this morning.

But, [T]echnology is absolutely, 100 percent, The rapid flowering of ‘Californian ideology’?, in positivist concept of human evolution, drew on a long tradition which Leo Marx aptly termed the ‘technological sublime’. Sublime my ass, one function may be served by the short-circuit of the ‘new economy’ in the dot.com bust of 2001 is that it at least cleared some space for a more nuanced assessment of digital culture away and we see things as they are instead of some manifest utopia. I am that man of the crux; I photograph (see Benjamin) an image, Marx had almost nothing to say about the impact of technology on culture – a lacuna that Walter Benjamin generously attributes to the fact that capitalism was in its ‘infancy’ when Marx undertook his analysis. Benjamin’s ‘Artwork’ essay (2003), written during his exile in Paris between 1935 and 1939 (if you don’t own Benjamin Illuminations – buy it now, just for that article famously takes up the impact of ‘technological reproduction in the cultural realm).

In effect, Benjamin theorizes what Vertov’s ‘Man with the Movie Camera’ had sought to enact, positing a privileged relation between film and the demand to comprehend the illusionary nature of film (illusory nature of comments on an article as projection device) a technologically transformed world (the flowering of a simulated world between authors). For second degree; it is the result of editing (but not interaction), (how many times do you edit your live work? Re-post comments?). For Benjamin, the ‘second degree’ illusion of film shooting by the specially adjusted montage corresponds to profound changes in social photographic device and the assembly of experience as the industrial city displaced ‘nature’ as the primary lived environment. What first appears in that shot with others of the same kind. The equipment-free aspect of reality has here his 1927 essay on Russian film as the ‘dynamite of become the height of artifice, and the the fraction of a second’ becomes the ‘optical uncovision of immediate reality the Blue Flower subconscious’ of the 1930s, a technological lever capable of in the land of technology. (Benjamin, liberating the masses from the prison-house of the industrial city). However, I was thinking that it is a mistake to assume, as Mark Poster (1995) does with his ‘second media age’, that Benjamin was unswervingly positive towards ‘new media’ because he saw the shifting capability in the new medium. Film’s ‘shock’ capacity is intensely ambivalent: as much as it can blow everyday reality apart to reveal its hidden springs, it can also render the fragments indifferent to history. Cinema thus occupies a crucial place in the dialectical movement of history: it is both a symptom of the hold of modern technology over consciousness and a lever for unlocking that hold, and of course at the end we know the pervasive control systems that current media instantiate (shared hallucination of fear created by 24-hour news channels, as the most glaring example).

This ambivalence is apparent in the more sanguine formulation of cinema Benjamin offered in ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, written in 1939 alongside the final version of the ‘Artwork’ essay:

There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by film. In a film, perception conditioned by shock [chockförmige Wahrnehmung] was established as a formal principle. What determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of reception of film. (2003: 328), and of course what is needed is a new formulation that deals with the emergence of ‘reality tv’ as a form of simulated-relative shock chair whose induced fabricated discomfort and anxiety achieves it’s intended e/a-ffect which is to render the viewing catatonic and drooling.

Here film, and its most recent incarnation as broadcast tv is aligned, not with the dynamiting of the social world by revealing its ‘optical unconscious’, but with the system of industrial training systems (but with industrial removed and replaced with ‘service industry’). Benjamin draws on Marx’s comparison between ‘training’ and ‘practice’: where practice depends on skills acquired over time from experience, training depends upon the strict division of labour and the fragmentation of work tasks. For Marx (cited by Benjamin, 2003: 329) the unskilled worker on the assembly line ‘does not make use of the working conditions. The working conditions make use of the worker.’

Post(ing) Self-Similarity

Syntax, dear friend,

writhes as you do;

for to write is to choose at the cross-roads

both true,

and untrue; and I doubt my love,

just as I, mimetic desire

that your love bleed over my face,

set me aflame,

scorch my body with searing, woe and turbulence

so my mind might

being confined in penitence prison

I come to read the signs,

across your printed skin

and know itself to be a lexicon,

of outspoken sin.

The political ambiguity of media thus turns on whether its radical impact – its capacity to break the world into fragments, dismantling old patterns and enabling new relationships to be imagined – will be reduced to another mode for industrial training of the senses. For Benjamin, this is finally not so much a question of the formal process of fragmentation, as Adorno feared, but a question of meaning. Can ‘distracted’ perception generate collective meaning capable of entering individual experience, and thus become the conscious basis for recognition of the conditions of one’s existence and self-creation process?

This ambiguity, described in 1927 by Benjamin’s contemporary Siegfried Kracauer as ‘the go-for-broke game of history’, is helpful in situating the ambivalence of the ‘global information society’ orchestrated by contemporary digital networks. On the one hand, technologically mediated ‘flows’ radically undermine the traditional social consequences of space and place; on the other hand, as Sassen observes, new information technologies are integral to the emergence of ‘global cities’, which concentrate command and control functions in the  global economy. This produces radically uneven spatial textures in which intimacy at a distance (think about the perceived level of intimacy on Twitter between people who have never met) is juxtaposed to the disjunction of physically proximate areas and the virtual exile of communities lacking appropriate technology and resources (the digital divide has widened into the grand canyon), which brings us back to Chan:

“in the gap between the act of posting and the post itself, there seems to me to be a gap of presence. A juxtaposition of here and now, and there and elsewhere, that coincides with the act of youtubing a concert live. Why do we do it (use social media), and for whom, if and when the medium is built on a radical uncertainty of presence: a gap composed of parts discontinuity, distraction, and disconnection?” ~gravity7, Post Writing: Social Self, Private Self, Post(ing) Self

In the same ambivalent vein, decentralized person-to-person communication offers significant structural challenges to the media and communication forms that dominated the 20th century, yet ‘the technologies of freedom’ celebrated by de Sola because he was doing anything unusual or Pool (1983) are produced by corporate oligopolies deviant. . . . Data-gathering is routine, whose scale and global reach is unprecedented, and generalized, and distributed across almost every sphere of daily life. (Lyon, 2003: is matched at every step by the extension of personal 97) surveillance even with the “radical uncertainty of presence.” New media networks enabled the rapid coordination of rolling global political campaigns against war in Iraq, yet the health of workers making computer chips, like the disposal of old First World computer equipment in the developing world, remains largely invisible. And, despite the pervasive rhetoric of freedom, the potential of peer-to-peer networks is being reshaped in the wake of Napster via a combination of technological and legal patches designed to protect existing content owners, who are fast shifting consumers to lucrative time-based licensing models of consumption. Again, technology tooled for subversion is appropriated into the system as a new instantiation of control systems by the media oligopolies – which we see right now with the proliferation of social media “experts,” attempting to teach those media conglomerates how to co-opt the subversive nature of talk on twitter to carpet bomb the memespace of constructed identities within the social networks.

In Gilles Deleuze’s terms the digital era represents a shift from ‘disciplinary’ to ‘control’ societies (and now we come full circle back to the idea of mediated | medicated). Where disciplinary societies depended on moulds, physical structures such as Bentham’s panoptic architecture, control societies operate by modulation, a flexible form of active molding defined by the ubiquity of digital information. Yet the flood of information that characterizes digital culture is both the extension of control and the possibility of its disruption. The crucial issue is still the threshold Benjamin identified as a consequence of the techno- the old sovereign societies worked with logical destruction of aura: how to develop a ‘politics’ simple machines, levers, pulleys, clocks; commensurate to technological modernity, so that but recent disciplinary societies were information can be made meaningful, not just as the equipped with thermodynamic machines stance of isolated individuals but as a collective presenting the passive danger of entropy understanding capable of entering individual experience the active danger of sabotage; control presence of the technologically transformed world. The societies function with a third generation widespread and unfulfilled demand for a new social-of machines, with information technology extending beyond the confined technological and computers, where the passive danger boundaries of the market is registered in the is noise and the active, piracy and viral advertising strategies of mobile phone companies, as contamination. Much as in contemporary art, which can be characterized in terms of ‘relational aesthetics’ manifested in the emergence of artworks which are no longer objects or images but modes of social connection and interaction on Twitter.  (oh shit, here it comes), so I’ll leave it with this stream of consciousness, since I seem to be losing traction here:

“caught in the cuts of life, The end of man
often lies at hand, his tribal voice cut out
but whereof can one
not speak?  It is on the table;
it is in my grasp;
it has soaked into the carpet.  As a man,
my               permission opens me aimlessly:
I move my mouth and walk therein,
stride with confidence into a the empty room
of my                                            detachment,

I            swallowed hard the whole bottle of your silence
and slipped into the cup of a nightingale’s tear—

Will    memories of your touch, will

you become my fragrant flash of searing pain,
my dusted desire to be right up against it

Feeding       —     on tears of sight,
pull the blinds, hidden beying veils of disguise
beneath the covers, one leg stretches
beside a leg outstretched, These dance and meld, and
should point recursively back to relatively simple declarative sentences,

“Emersive simulation catalyzed by melding techne with conciousness”

state their assertions  and are done with it,

but as lines of verse they are just begging for

some leg room, or for some breathing space.

It’s tempting to conjecture,

that “feeding on tears of sight” are here reflected in the caesurae,

but if that is indeed the case, the effect is entirely (in-betweening), no

rhythmic division is enhanced, more conflation, no, more on that later,

thinking that I want my enjambements to be like tourniquets, cutting off the blood,

or, rather,

the breath of this streaming, no?”