Ilinx

ILINX

Ilinx is an hypertextual browser-based explorable space. Its matrix consists in a patchwork of electronic literature, a continuum where different projects and texts on the relation between language and representation, reality and fiction, humans and computers, symbiontically fuse togheter intertwined through the lens of subjective experience (or phenomenal consciousness). Beyond the surface, Ilinx is a quest to develop a platform connecting the paths of my personal epistemological and existential research. The result of this research, at this point in time, consists in a conception of software as an out-of-hardware experience, projecting the self into an hyperstitional spazio-temporal oecumene where new worlds can be designed and inhabited augmenting self-consciousness and affecting reality (past, present and future).

Ilinx

"[Ilinx is [a game]] based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness." 
- Roger Caillois, 'Man, Play and Games' (1958)

Before the virus

I was working on several small projects and making a lot of notes of different texts trying to figure out to design the best main narrative that could work as mainframe interconnecting all the small projects and texts I produced and encountered. In the meanwhile, I was trying to figure out how to design the landing page of this project. All I know was that it would have take the form of a sort of map of elements interconnected in some complex way. I also contancted a friend of mine studying at Sonology (den haag) to design the music but I didn't have anything concrete yet. In the 2 weeks before the pandemics started, I was mostly focusing on finishing the thesis, already in a self-imposed quarantine.

During the pandemics

I broke my HDD but I managed to retrieve the files I was working on (or most of them I guess). I had to buy a new one and I've installed ubuntu. All this, unfortunately took me a week. However, I've been lucky. My computer works better now, and I had the opportunity to go deeper in my understanding of software. From that 'no bootable device' so frustrating, to fighting with the BIOS, breacking into the hardware, buying the wrong HDD, various failed partitionings, trying to install different OS unsuccesfully ecc...

When everything was again set up and working I migrated all the contents on the git (I had my last tutorial with Michael at that time) and reorganized them under two main categories:

• code-based > exploration on coding / mechanisms of the browser / exploration in machinic life (Cybernetics/AI/Alife)
• texts-based > exploration of texts / augmenting texts through code / create narratives / design explorable space through texts

This projects are in a "middle" phase. They are conceptually finished but they still need to be reorganized/improved/linked to the main narrative.

Few days later, I was reading [this text], apparently disconnected to my work and project. It is interesting that I've found this publication ,called Glass Bead (which gathers texts of philosophers, artist, scientists ecc..), because it is organized by a guy who I've met last year, a friend of Adi (some week before I had the bad news) that was doing its Phd at the Goldsmith in Cultural Studies (where also Matthew Fuller was teaching). Previously unaware of the meaning of Glass Bead, then I figured out it was about a fictional game described by Herman Hesse in its last book. Between the pages of that text, approaching the end, I've encountered the illuminating term. >> Ilinx Intrigued by its definition I searched the source > Roger Caillois < and then all the pieces started to come at their place. Ilinx, the pursuit of vertigo.

My project is strictly related to my thesis, in particular to the very conclusion where the concept of 'language maze' attempts to reconstruct my effort in exploring self-consciousness.

"Perhaps, the link between the human and the machinic consists of the maze created by their intertwining layers of languages. [2] A "language maze" made of verbal and non-verbal languages, natural languages and formal languages, computer's code and machine languages. A Deadalus' labyrinth of material, informational, algorithmic and literary explorable spaces developing in the horizontal and the vertical direction, from microscopic to macroscopic territories, internal external and internal spheres. A Penelope's web made of rooms that, as Escherian paintings, hides recursive simulations and emulations of other rooms, other mazes and itself. Perhaps, what distinguishes the human from the machinic, is the feeling, illusory or real, of being whole with the "language maze" as an infinite space (logos) where to build new worlds from scratch."  
- mine

"The Labyrinth is presented, then, as a human creation, a creation of the artist and of the inventor, of the man of knowledge, of the Apollonian individual, yet in the service of Dionysus the animal-god."  
- Giorgio Colli, the birth of philosophy (1975)

It is not a pure coincidence - that one of the main sources of my approach follow the prolific path of the so called "Limit-experience" explored by that group of "mens of knowledge" whose main figure is George Bataille. The limit of language, transgression. It is not a pure coincidence - Caillois worked with Bataille, they funded togheter the 'College of sociology' and he published in Bataille's publication/cult that is 'Acéphale' and which logotype is the meander of a labyrinth. It is not a pure coincidence - that Giorgio Colli , the main philosopher exploring and translating Nietsche works in Italy, can be claimed to be an independent figure of that same intellectual movement, 'Limit experience', that is also called 'Nietzsche renaissance'. Pushing the understanding of philosophy and knowledge beyond the apollinean rupture caused by Socrates and Plato in the dyonisiac society, its work traces back the origin of philosophy into the Daedalus' labyrinth and the mystery contained in our own rationality. (It is not a pure coincidence - that the Glass Bead Game is profoundly related to my project, even though I barely know its obscure context, and that the 'language maze' is the Wittgenstenian 'linguistic game', or 'form of life', reborn under the hypnotizing gyration of Ilinx) It is not a pure coincidence...

Only later I recognized, that Ilinx was imposing itself as the only possible name for this project. The understanding of game (and play) as Ilinx cames out to be the key to piece togheter my projects and thoughts under the mask of a mind reaching the borders of its symbolic consciousness and spinning into the whirlpool of intuition and creativity. But understood as a mere facade of the actual source: fiction, de-con-struction and altered state of mind. Why do I need to use the same narrative, why can't I jump suddenly from one point/project/text to another and follow this jump shifting reality, bending it to the power of fiction and beyond, into the deep sea of never ending possibility and disrupted/unfinished/missed narratives. The FINAL foundational framework. Ilinx.

In parallel to the ressurrection of Ilinx, another relevant fact signed the total vertigo slowly banishing (me), the thief-author from the ownership of my own work . Here comes the > spiral In that period I started to read the texts of the CCRU. I was already aware of the converging forces linking my practice and my theories to their weird work. To mention some, my early passion for Kode9 and the uk-bass dubstep scene, Matthew Fuller who was 'one fo them', the discourse on theory/fiction/reality and more theoretical subjects I'm exploring and which the CCRU seems to mirror in their odd visions from the past.

> ccru

> hyperstition

> spiral

> pataphisics

> cults - secret societies - mysterous mythological islands

> the vision of lemuria - mu - thule - hyperborea

> ilinx

> disturbing dreams

> jumanji effect

> what ilinx really is

Actual situation

• designing the starting point/facade of the world of ilinx/landing page (see main/variations/index.html) and populate it.
• writing different texts [as this text itself] as:

Exercises in Ilinx self-definition

• working with Andre to host Ilinx linking my home-server to the (xp)hub >> hub.xpub.nl/ilinx
• defining a methodology for the audio (my friend is already working based on the details I passed her)

Next steps

Structure

The projects and texts that will become the nodes of ilinx's language maze, expands beyond the browser into the layers of code (HTML, CSS, JS), and are interwoven through quasi-consistent pieces of narrative, fragments of different stories spanning between history and myth, theory and fiction, fantasy and science-fiction, following the definition of ilinx developed by Roger Callois.

Main Nodes

Collecting References

• Myst
• Colossal Cave Adventure / Zorg
• Rouge-like games

• ELIZA
• Clippy

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