User:Cristinac/Annotations1504

Lexia to Perplexia

As ARTIFICIAL LIFE researchers have argued, simulation does not necessarily mean that the processes running in a computer are artificial.The processes can be as “natural” as anything in the real world; they are artificial only in the sense that they run in an artificial medium. Thus the naturalness or artificiality of the environment becomes a variable to be defined by the work, not a pregiven assumption determined by the medium.

One way to bring these issues into focus is to notice at what points the screen displays cease to be legible as readable texts. These occluded representations create visual images that mark the limits of what human perception can discern. Illegible texts hint at origins too remote for us to access and interfaces transforming too rapidly for us to grasp. The text announces its difference from the human body through this illegibility, reminding us that the computer is also a writer, and moreover a writer whose operations we cannot wholly grasp in all their semiotic complexity. Illegibility is not simply a lack of meaning, then, but a signifier of distributed cognitive processes that construct reading as an active production of a cybernetic circuit and not merely an internal activity of the human mind.

In this broader context, illegible text reminds us of the changes our bodies are undergoing as they are remapped and reinterpreted by intelligent machines working within networks that bind together our flesh with their electronic materiality. In this posthuman conjunction, bodies of texts and bodies of subjects evolve together in complex configurations that carry along the past even as they arc toward an open and unknown future.

Acknowledging the illusion of an autonomous I/Eye, I-terminal subverts autonomy through the hyphenated appendage that connects human vision with the scanning electrode beam of a computer display.

If we like, we can suppose that the originating machine is the human and the simulative one the computer. But any such assignment partakes of the Imaginary, for the emergence of the Iterminal reveals that the division between the human and the technological is an origin story that narrates as a temporal process something that was always already the case.

Realtime is a phrase programmers use to indicate that the simulated time of computer processes is running, at least temporarily, along the same time scale as the real time experienced by humans.

“Hyperlobal” neatly sutures lobes—presumably of the brain—into the hyperglobal expectations of a worldwide communication system, creating a technohuman hybrid. A similar conflation resonates in logos as a mathematical (sine) function and a word capable of signification (sign).

the creole performs what it describes, creating a narrative that reaches back to an origin already infected (or *.fected) with technology and pushes forward into a future dominated by communification.

The noise that permeates the text may serve as a stimulus to emergent complexity, but it also ensures meanings are always unstable and that totalizing interpretations impossible.

For example, “inTents” references the motivations that drive the creation and consumption of the text; it also is a pun on “intense,” the state of focused alertness necessary to comprehend this difficult text. Moreover, through internal capitalization it suggests that the state of in-tending can be read both as inwardness and as a trajectory “tending” toward some end, presumably communification.To decode these multiple meanings, the user needs three different sensory modalities: sight, sound, and kinesthesia.To catch the intents/intense pun, the user must “hear” the sound through subvocalization; to decode the creolized pun suggested by interior capitalization, the user must attend to the word’s visual form; and to connect word with screen design, the user must move the cursor over many areas of the surface.:Writing, a technology invented to preserve speech from temporal decay, here is made to instantiate the very ephemerality it was designed to resist. Kaye understood that her relation to this writing was being reconfigured to require the same mode of attention she normally gave to speech. If her thoughts wandered and her attention lapsed while she was listening to someone speak, it was impossible to go back and recover what was lost, in contrast to rereading a passage in a book.

The electronic medium is here used to create “noisy” messages, making noise itself a message about the distributed cognitive environment in which reading takes place.

Embodiments of Material Metaphors:

Keynotes: simulation environment, techno-subjectivity, communification, flickering signifier