Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.20.1606041915120.10146@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Talking Domains
Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2016 19:17:08 -0400 (EDT)
Talking Domains Notes for upcoming talk, Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria http://www.alansondheim.org/vic56.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/gear.mp4 http://www.alansondheim.org/shfft.mp4 Outline 1. Advantages of using virtual worlds. Suppleness, universal audience. 2. Rough guide: packaged movements, avatars, objects, variable physics. 3. Second Life, MacGrid, localhost 4. Ideas of Gamespace, Edgespace, Blankspace 5. What happens at edgespaces? Everything is still contained 6. Blankspaces and the imaginary 7. Languaging - see Use of Writing below. Idea of lived writing. 8. dynamics, category theory, morphisms and arrows, objects: think of gamespace/edgespace/blankspace as dynamic, striated: how do these meld? gamespace as kernel: Trump the bully totalizes this: what occurs internally (truth functions) is irrelevant. edgespace: regions of contestation again circumlocuted. blankspace: contestation of the imaginary. Directory Categories (of examples): blankspace edgespace gamespace In Sl, supple and indefinite modeling. What happens at the _edges_ of models? Models as gamespace structures. Epistemology of gamespace - speak to Sandy re: online/offline gaming - cosplay etc. - Blankness, substance (fissure, not cut/inscription) - the problematic of same/same/same/ the _queasiness_ - of structurelessness - unstructured - loss of structure - - the imaginary - deprivation chambers - - what's down there, what's all around us? GAMESPACE / EDGESPACE / BLANKSPACE Language, Accident, and the Virtual In this talk, I focus on concepts of blankness, geography, gamespace in virtual worlds, and what I term edgespace - the limits of the gamespace, where language occurs and seethes. I argue that the phenomenology of the real comes into play when living spaces are abandoned, where broken geographies are signs of a future already present. I present instances of digital language production in such spaces, working through virtual worlds such as Second Life and the Macgrid, as well as self-contained Open Sim software that can be run on most computers. The edgespace is always uneasy, tottering, catastrophic; it is the space of the unalloyed digital, where things no longer operate within a classical or modernist tradition. Increasingly, this space characterizes our current place in the world, with its fractured media histories and environments of scorched earth, environmental depredation, and slaughter. We can work through and within such spaces, developing (as perhaps Occupy did) new forms of production, resistance, and digital culture. Use of writing: The creation of texts within the videos is in real time think of a jazz improvisation. So its not like a text pinning down the videos, but more like talking within them: The texts are an immersive experience. Its not illustrated poetry; its being there, being within these spaces. If you were in them when the texts are being spoken, you would read them as part of your immersive experience as well. This is a fundamental difference compared, for example, to conceptual art, where writing is a structural orientation to illustration. --- emphasize the problematic of codes, organisms, classification schemes - what constitutes gamespace (ARG? the game of "life"? the game of life?) - how is everything entangled? how can one disassociate gamespace/rules for example from other domains? are there clear-cut distinctions? in Wittgenstein, games and "game" and "language game" disassociated these things. Wittgenstein was _clean_ - language games occurred with loose referents but within language. he _spoke._ we're language-centric of course. consider "completely" entangled - what does that mean? what might "surface symptomologies" tell us about the coruscations beneath the surface? where image/imaginary comes in - reading among chaos, chaotic waveforms when Weyl's notion of hunting for automorphisms falls through structures of examination and abjection. "What we have learn from our whole discussion and what has indeed become a guiding principle in mathematics is this lesson: _Whenever you have to do with a structure-endowed entity E try to determine its group of auto- morphisms,_ the group of those element-wise transformations which leave all structural relations undisturbed." (Weyl, Symmetry, p. 144.)