Semantic Foundry

Audio: Secret Machines, First Wave Contact.

Pretense: 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 punch-drunken stupor:

1. Subject matter should be broadly empathetic.
2. The Stance should be direct and uncomplicated.
3. An Argument should be compulsively refined.
4. Emphasis should focus on a minimum of three levels of abstracted meaning and 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

I don’t think this means we all hope to be viral (certainly not like some social media douchebags). 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 emergent entities existing independent from the cognitive processes of the individuals it is made of; capable 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]

Words for Tuesday 04.19.11:

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 chemicals  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 static signification; no symbol representative of the vast Terra Incognita of Knowledge, for the Facts and Agencies of Mind and matter reserved for future Explorers.” – Remix of 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-narrative inscribed within a conceptually simulated noospace. It is the intertextuality of a 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 wrote, the 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-recursive process 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. [Cycle]

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 we invent the universe.

These 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 mediated networked public that makes it feel like something more than just a diary website – the re-contextualization makes the simulacra 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.

Semanticwill-out. 04.19.2011 5:23:55am EST