Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0808110201490.14487@panix1.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Inside the Sphere, description and theory
Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2008 02:02:27 -0400 (EDT)
Inside the Sphere, description and theory Several molecular engines within the aegis of the sphere; out of world anomalous behavior seems to have slowed. I'm running Second Life on my Asus eeepc 701; contrary to what I've read, the installation went in flawlessly and SL runs reasonably well in the Debian Etch environment. I made a few minor changes, placing the cache on an external flash card for example; the SL client wouldn't run from the card, but the cache is fine. To make up for the 512 meg memory, I increased the cache to 600 meg and turned media off. Everything runs, albeit slowly; the image is clear enough to allow some house-cleaning on the road. Inside the sphere, since it's self-contained - an 'environment' seems to form, one that appears self-bounded. In other words, there is always inscription; if it's not inherent in a given virtual world, it's going to be created as soon as one begins to configure anything. An object carries structure; even anomalous or ghostly spews or objects create an uncanny domain (appear to tap an uncanny domain). In other words, inside the sphere, you don't see the sphere, flat black against nothing. So the objects are there, but you don't necessarily think they're _somewhere._ Where they are is circumscribed by their presence. They seem to be a closed manifold. There doesn't seem to be anything beyond them. The manifold seems differentiable. The ring streams, though, seem to go somewhere; they're vectors, directed line segments; they seem cut off; they disappear; perhaps there's something to that disappearance, after all. One moves around and among objects and rings and whatever one might consider particles and objects, but it's difficult to move around here without breaking the fragility of the illusion, what might be considered a second-order illusion. What's presenced within the sphere, a simulacrum of an organism, simultan- eously passive and generating; the repetition of a rectangle defined only as a process (again, a second-order process within the processes/protocols of Second Life itself), moving and disappearing, clearly the result of an other movement drawing and drawn in three- dimensional space; a signal or memory of a signal: A memory of a signal is a signal; a signal is always memory. How clear that is in the sphere! How clearly understood! And such is the meaning-memory of organism and the murmuring of organism, even in a digital-granular domain such as this one. http://www.alansondheim.org sleee, esl, essl series (most recent jpgs) To access the Odyssey exhibition The Accidental Artist: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/48/12/22 Teleport from the cone to the skysphere.