Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.58.0401200033590.20942@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: forwarded post I sent to Poetics, might be of interest here -
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 00:34:18 -0500 (EST)
>From sondheim@panix.com Tue Jan 20 00:30:57 2004 Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 00:30:33 -0500 (EST) From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com> To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU> [In response to a meditation on codework and the World Trade Center, among other things - I thought it might be of interest by itself, here.] I think it's in Michael Benedikt's Cyberspace: First Steps, all the way from the early 90s, the idea of a liquid architecture - which unites the post-WTC hybrids and code itself; the latter is mobile, always in flux, protocol-dependent, software/hardware dependent, just as these letters are written in 'lower ascii,' another code necessary placed in the sendmail protocols, the tcp/ip protocols, all the way back and forth among routers, operating systems, radio transmissions, even wireless protocols. And there is always a bit of illumination realizing that hitting a key on a computer keyboard INTERRUPTS, and is read as an interrupt, that communication is an interference in quietude or flux. At night one loses sleep, is it codes or noise and chaos? Wolfram provides a way out, the simplest codes tending towards enormously complex chaotic structures reminiscent of noise, but not annihilating. My own pessimistic tendency heads towards plasmas, the inconceivable alienness of space, dark matter, strings, quarks with problematic spins, all these things tearing at our pretence to eternity and even towards comprehensino. Brillouin, a French physicist, created the idea decades ago that our knowledge of the physical world is tied directly to economics - the larger the machinery, the more energy consumed - the greater the number of anomalies. It's not even known if there's an end to it. The current Linux Journal describes software developed to manage the industrial processes of high-energy physics machine fabrication - already another mini-industry in itself. Code or annihilation of code, presence or absence, interrupting parasite or well-loved guest, the world is a miracle. - Alan http://www.asondheim.org/ http://www.asondheim.org/portal/.nikuko http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt Trace projects http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm finger sondheim@panix.com