User:Jules/graddraft

Tentative Title
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Introduction
When we take the Internet for granted but we never really ask ourselves where we are going when we are going on the Internet. I keep on feeling disturbed when I have a skype conversation with someone in a different time zone standing perpendicularly to a ground that is not aligned with the ground I stand on. So to circumvent the risk of magical thinking, I started to seek for answers to very naive interrogations I had. This has led me to realise that the way I want to relate physical experience with online experience raises questions about the complexity of understanding them in a satisfying way. This I think, because the Internet is not physical itself in many ways. Firstly, there is a big push towards hiding the infrastructure supporting its running. Secondly, its use doesn't correlate with any phenomenological sensation (unlike trains for instance). Lastly, the fast integration of the Internet as part of our daily life, always supporting more applications, has dissolved any questions relating to its functioning. There is a global lack of curiosity, that has served its blackboxing, which has also made it incredibly powerful. Even harder, the Internet has always been regarded as a place rather than a mere communication tool, like the phone. We have indeed never regarded the phone call as a place where oral conversation happens.

My practice has always been motivated by the pursue of a rational explanation of what this place might be. By trying to apply rational scientific method to retrieve information about it, always departing from methods applied to the physical realm, I tried to make it more tangible to myself. Everytime, I end up bumping into an obstacle that reveals aspects. I hadn't previously envisioned (the politics of deploying infrastructures, the very hierarchical organisation of transfer etc). I feel that what makes my failures interesting are those points where methods from the comprehension of the physical space don't manage to reveal it all about the Internet as a space. These also enable me to define what sort of space the Internet is in my own criteria, through my own experience of seeking answers for my techno-naive wonders. Every new attempt feels like a new chapter.

DEFINE SPACE AND PLACE – MAP AND TERRITORY

I guess somehow I am still thinking with my Art student background, which is full of references to Aesthetics and History of Art. Although I feel Art is a space for discussion, and Art should raise contemporary concerns (and feed itself from what's happening outside its microcosm). I feel like there is something unsolvable within whatever I am doing. Some issues I am having here have been longly discussed within aesthetical discourses without ever being solved (Parrashius and Zeuxis, Plato vs Mimesis, Pussinists vs Rubenists, Idea vs Experience, Skeumorphism vs Functional interface) I'm not sure if I have formulated my questions yet but we refer to the Internet as a place while we cannot go there. I wonder if it is not rather comparable to a living being that we all create? In Art History Landscapes have already been used as a reflection of human's inner state and sometimes.

Relation to previous practice
Previous practice involves :
- trying to link what's physically possible and what's computationally feasible
- trying to turn space into territory and failing at it
- how it raises more questions than it answers any
- trying to sketch a relation to a World embedding a space that cannot be physically experienced
- trying to apply scientific thinking, or methods aimed at the physical space surrounding us (geography, physics etc) to computer Networks
- bumping into points of convergence or dissonance

Relation to a larger context
Things I have looked at:
- Mimesis (plato, Aristotle, opposition between imitation of the real and idea)
- Land Art (Environment, entropy)
- Minimalism/conceptual Art (60s, process, performance, environment)
- Cybernetics (Feedback, Entropy) and “French theory” (structuralism, de subjectivisation)
- Physical infrastructures of the Internet (hidden container) vs behaviour or Protocols ruling the Internet (defining sets of rules enabling exchanges)
- Scientific methods (Geometry, Geography, Physics, extracting abstract set of rules to understand phenomenons that require abstract thinking)
- Maps (attempts to visualise)
- Metaphors applied to the Internet (cognitive medium influencing space perception)

Thesis intention
Practical steps
I think it is important for me to establish a list of ways to approch the problem, like angles to highlight or understand things. Every time in the doing, I realise little experiments and I write a text about it for which I gather information, read and try to develop a logical approach. Very often this logical approach gets offended (I'll think of a better formulation). I think it is nice to establish a collection of those points where I get blocked, what I have learnt etc... Then it can become a text in different parts through being reorganised in a more logical order so there is a clear shape to it.

References
- Cyber geography, Martin Dodge
- Robert Smithson's writings
- Foucault's concept of heterotopias
- Le socle du monde, Manzoni

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Introduction
I have no capacity to understand very abstract things, so I always need to break them into pieces and reassemble them by comparing them to things I can visualise. I guess that's my method so it should remain that way.
→ video essay – worded ideas / narration / abstraction
→ environment and ideas
→ architecture / infrastructures / reseaux
→ Am I thinking about computer networks in physical terms?

This project shall be
A video "essay" as a way to articulate all the questions I have been asking myself in the form of something more global.
The way of presenting it is very important. Shall the video be within an altered environment or shall it affect people

This project is an investigation of
- how these two correlate (experienced environment and abstracted ideas about it?)
- How the smooth eventually becomes striated?
- how feedback applies until things break? (breaking stuff enables seeing parts?)
- electronic environment and physical environment merging?

Previous practice
- establishing parallels between the inhabited space (meatspace) and the information space
- looking at land art to find correlations between what happens in one environment and how certain mechanisms such as entropy, referred to as obsolescence
→ apply the same way (land art pieces can become obsolete unless they get upgraded like spiral jetty?)
- looking at the construction of categories and definitions to separate them both while we should merge those – naturalisation of technology?
- looking at the problem of the separation of idea and experience that generate certain bias