User:Ssstephen/Reading

oh this one?

Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines, Lisa Gitelman

Print culture and non print media evolve in mutual inextricability. The phonograph and contemporary inscriptive forms were deeply dependent upon reworkings of the social and economic relations of textuality, of print culture and print capitalism. They engaged literacy practices in toto, the cognitive and the somatic, the semiotic and the social. They helped question authors and readers as subjects and modify the experienced subjectivities of speakers, performers, publishers, and literates. In doing so they kept intervening into dynamic constructions of private and public, community and difference. p13

"Our copyright laws urgently need revision. They are imperfect in definition, confused and inconsistent in expression; they omit provision for many articles which, under modern reproductive processes, are entitled to protection; they impose hardships upon the copyright proprietor which are not essential to the fair protection of the public; they are difficult for the courts to interpret and impossible for the Copyright Office to administer with satisfaction to the public." [1]

Ted Nelson on hypertext

The power of language in Jewish Kabbalah and magic: how to do and undo things with words, Agata Paluch

read on bl.uk

Literary Machines, Ted Nelson

(reading method note: read chapters 1 & 2 with no writing/notetaking, now re-scanning and writing these notes)

TN shows a diagram of "Ordinary" Hypertext which he proposes is a simplification of a (his) bigger more unifying idea. But surely there are more "Weird" Hypertexts? "Different" Hypertexts, "Strange" Hypertexts, "Outside" Hypertexts.

Check out Douglas Engelbart's NLS at Stanford Research Institute.

The reason that it (Project Xanadu) has taken so long is that all of its ultimate features are part of the design

Again this seems super prescriptive to me, not sure if I like that. No room for adaptation of structure, this is apparently the ultimate superstructure. ("unified structure to handle it all", "clean design", etc etc words that start warning signals for me)

TN seems to me to have some hidden/unaddressed desires to make this a corporate or commercial structure, in particular on page 0/6 where he compares Xanadu to Xerox Corporation (even the name dude), and page 0/13 where he offers new recruits "a small chance of fame and fortune".

A diagram of an oppressive hypertext, based on a phrase from Ted Nelson's Literary Machines "repressive hypertext"

THE BOOK STOPS HERE.

Ex TOT DAG: Expanding Tissue of Text, Data and Graphics (p. 0/9)

And publishing--ah consider what publishing will become

I like the optimistic rhetoric though and definitely exciting to read.

Check out The Problems of Hypertext (Chapter 3 of this book?)

This book too is hardly everybody's cup of tea[quote added], since there is not much choice among its sequences

p.1/14 Note: I added the link, it there a protocol for this? I have adapted the more traditional [emphasis added]

Hypertext referred to as "nonsequence". In my experience it is more a multitude of sequences, this is what I assumed the hyper- part meant. p.1/15

"Colored links" p.1/15: Interesting contrast to my interpretation of p.0/2 "Ordinary" Hypertext as part of a prescriptive system.

"Compound hypertext" p.1/16: In general the tone of this chapter sits with me better. I think TN is presenting the same ideas but without the intense rhetoric of the start.

Pictures and diagrams are intrinsically nonsequential

p.16 (mkay)

Talmud as hypertext p.1/16: a body of accumulated comment and controversy Admitting hypertext is not from the future, I'm into this.

It is my belief that this new ability to represent ideas in the fullness of their interconnectedness will lead to easier and better writing, easier and better learning, and a far greater ability to share and communicate the interconnections among tomorrows ideas and problems

p.1/19. Again with the uber-optimistic futuristic rhetoric imo. I get this is still chapter one of the book but I see no space in his language for considering the potential issues of this new system. Where's my hoverboard?

Paper Machines, Markus Krajewski

P63 In Praise of the Cross-Reference

Index card system as authors assistant when cross referencing is used, or communication partner

Conscious and unconscious cross referencing

Clarifying creative prompts

Intentional (re conscious unconscious?) incorrect references can stimulate. Like Denis Diderot in Encyclopedia

Index cards as stars

Index cards as neurons

Index cards as stock prices

Index cards as sex in the city characters

Mapping

Scope/accuracy of a reference... Reference to mathematics vs reference to godels incompleteness theorem. Focus

  “ Every  note  is  only  one  element" 

Claude Shannon Entropy

Nikolas Luhmann physical index cards in the late twentieth century (Anonymous . 1929c . “ Kartei ” als Warenzeichen gelöscht! Rationelle Betriebsführung, n.p.) ( Vogt , Victor . 1922 . Die Kartei: Ihre Anlage und Führung. Vol. 5 of Orga-Schriften. 2nd edition , revised by Dr. Porstmann. Berlin : Organisation Verlagsanstalt)

n.p.

-

P65 On the Gradual Manufacturing of Thoughts in Storage

poetological - to do with the knowledge of creation? Don't have a dictionary right now

Konrad Gessner possible inventor of index cards

"the production of innovations is always based on the fortifi ed recombination of the existing."

Heinrich von Kliest midwifery of thought (On the Gradual Produc-tion of Thoughts Whilst Speaking 1805) borrowed from Kant

analects --- what is this?

Conversation creates ideas

The Text claims index cards are a valid substitute for the new connections and perspectives offered by a human in conversation. To me this implies the humans creativity is the same as the connections offered by the references; surprising, useful, inspiring, but also predetermined?

Index cards as "precise" "infallible", generally true compared to humans but a) has limits and b) has negative results as well as positive

Kliest - knowledge as a "condition" or state rather than a property

Recombinatory power comes from material nature of cards shuffling juxtaposing etc

"born from the spirit of sloth" index cards as laziness

Index cards as boredom

Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account, Niklas Luhmann

Thinking of the index cards as someone to be communicated with

"One of the most basic presuppositions of communication is that the partners can mutually surprise each other. "

Information can only be generated through comparison, OR (insert other logical operators here? Combination as information, XOR as information)

Different goals can lead to better mode informative communication

"The fixed filing place needs no system. It is sufficient that we give every slip a number which is easily seen and that we never change this number and thus the fixed place of the slip"

order is a system though, even chronology? Doesn't take relativity into account, implies some observer with a privileged frame of reference

This isn't just a hypothetical or theoretical limit, consider two authors editing the same wiki page

Multiverse library or multiverse wiki - if someone is already editing the page (or the entire wiki) and a second editor appears (or second observer), the new wiki "timeline" splinters from the last. (options in brackets would splinter much more frequently)

How does version history look in this system?

Could be experimented with a small simple system, maybe a single bit of content and two editors, with metadata for edit/version history

Secondary memory

Long term project, how to retain and enable access, preserve information, allow for expansion in future

Order should be purely formal, does this even makes sense? Can form be isolated?

"Every note is only an element which receives its quality only from the network of links and back-links within the system. " One billion Christians can't be wrong, one billion Muslims cant be wrong, one billion hyperlinks can't be wrong

Combination of order and disorder can (?) arise from formally ordered system

Examine supposedly formal orders, my instinct says they're not

Bookmarks

Bookmark sharing, bookmark searching, bookmark exchange, bookmark folders and structuring

Tags vs links, tags offer bidirectionality and multiple end points, links are just vectors while tags are fields

Accidents are the driving force for evolution

"to isolate these two aspects [ order and disorder] from each other is neither possible nor methodologically meaningful" <-- I like this

"tha accidents of reading"

What unread books can teach us, Oliver Burkeman

how to write a thesis don't have internet right now to find a readable version.

how-the-internet-makes-you-think-youre-smarter-than-you-really-are Another One to check out when I get internet connection

"Start with the title, Introduction and table of contents." Useful for reading and writing I think.

"the line wasn’t there" the blank web page, the imagined memory

Fugitive Libraries, Shannon Mattern

Melissa Adler, study of the politics of library classification

Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and Safiya Noble

BlackLivesMatter Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon

Should a library be neutral? Neutrality justifies disengagement

Catherine Allen Latimer, Nella Larsen, Regina Anderson Andrews, and Pura Belpré

"Carrollton, Georgia, librarian Edith Foster marked the spines of African-Americans’ books with a triangle, so readers of all races would know which texts were meant for whom"

Patterson Toby Graham, in his history of the struggle to integrate Alabama’s libraries, asks questions that are still pertinent today: “What is the role of a library and a librarian in an intolerant and fearful society? Have librarians been active agents or just passive observers in the ebb and flow of social change and social conscience?”

I am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter

to varying degrees, we human beings live inside other human beings already, even in a totally nontechnological world. the interpenetration of souls is an inevitable consequence of the power of the representationally universal machines that our brains are. that is the true meaning of the word 'empathy'.

He's not great with words (penetration, universal machines, true) but moving past that this is a beautiful idea. The idea of a soul or identity as distributed and modular. The possibility to at very least simulate eachother. He mentions coarse and fine grained a lot which makes me think of renormalisation, and in a good way. A mathematical approach that doesnt require division to reach truth. Accepting that truth can be found on different scales at different times. The night of the 10th of November 1619.

the myth of watertight boundaries between souls is something whose falsity we all have slight tastes of all the time, but since it is so convenient and so conventional to associate one body with precisely one soul, since it is so deeply tempting and so deeply ingrained to see a body and a soul as being in perfect alignment, we choose to downplay or totally ignored the implications of the everyday manifestations of the [intercirclusion] of souls.

Volumetric Regimes, Possible Bodies

Volumetric Regimes wiki

The So-called Lookalike

read it here A letter Manetta Barends wrote as the so-called designer of this book to a designer, such as the designer of the template used for the entire series, and made me think of a conversation we started to have in Methods yesterday about style.

The series editors insisted that we could take the design of the book into our own hands, as long as we would “follow the template”. They did not specify what this would mean exactly, but made clear that it was important for them that we honored the original design.

I am wondering how to reconnect your template and aesthetics to the way this book is being made?

We found a slab serif font that aligned with the one in your template and we figured out how to replicate the layout’s dynamics and overall structuration.

(emphasis added in all three above)

Aligned in what way, and why? As a fun misunderstanding Manetta then starts to talk about the "face on the cover" by which I thought she meant typeface. When she mentioned this slab-serif face I was already thinking about the implications of honouring the design choices in the template, and this made me think about the implications of using faces based on those from the early ninteenth century (in this book but also generally). If the face is aligned with the template, can it also be aligned with the contributors? Does everything have to be lined up? The spanish for 'line them up' is 'alinearlos' which is a useful term to know if you are trying to work with a designer whose communicates in spanish.

Yesterday (20221005) xpub1 were discussing style briefly while working together as a group. Myself and Bobi had attempted to not put our own formatting onto some texts we were comparing ('designing' and 'editing' respectively). But then when discussing the compared texts as a group, Cara immediately noticed them to be "very xpub". Brought up some thoughts about styles emerging from process and tools, individual and collective styles, and the implied next thought for me would be 'so what?', does it have any effect?

We Have Always Been GeoHackers

read it here Weird coincidence that I read this the day before learning to use the 3D printer. Although it first seemed like something not directly relevant some ties came up even in naming (gcode and gplates), but more interesting was looking at their process as a case study. 'Disobedient bug reporting and disobedient action research' seem like useful tools to me, and maybe are also interesting in relation to Manetta's letter above. I thought this was a good critique of a software environment and environment software.

body of the earth

This essay also references 'Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None' a few times which seems worth looking into.

From Work to Text[ to Sound], Roland Barthes

The title makes it clear already that text good work bad no work me text. When i first got a mobile phone it cost 9c to send a text. This steadily grew to 13c, although never cost as much as an MMS (up to 25c). Presumably the multi media message involved more work than the text, and hence the higher cost. Certainly an MMS usually involves the transfer of much more data than an SMS. Nasdaq defines information cost as

Transactions costs that include the assessment of the investment merits of a financial asset. Related: Search costs.

These days texts dont work in the same way as they used to, messaging has become over the top. An internet connection is required to go over the top, although a cellular network is not.

On B-dog's comparisons with music:

"to play" and "to listen" constituted a virtually undifferentiated activity

Barthes maybe saying that listening without playing is passive, spectating society? The text made me think of the word 'action' a lot, until Roro finally offers it in the cadence 'deferred action', the signifier as the beat that never drops. At sonic acts yesterday i found myself listening and also hearing. Trying hard not to see or read, which is difficult but Very Important Participation. Also attempting to keep silent, which is certainly easier but still a challenge (run through a forest with your hair tied in a braid without breaking a single branch). Sound good text bad because a sound is always part of an environment. You can't hear any thing except the mechanotransduction of your hair follicles, which your body is overcoding to stop you from overfalling and to give you spatial orientation. Sound is space or at very least they are signified in the same text.

Exploratory Programming, Nick Montford

1.7 Free Software and No-Cost Software

Free as in free beer, free speech, free love, free money, free palestine, freebird, free education, free ride, freefall, free willy, freesound.org, free facebook, free Tom Mooney, free your mind, free your mind arnhem, free music, free movies, free movies online, free movies watch now.

Further reading from this section: Free Texts Free Verse Free Software Free Software

America, Allen Ginsberg

America why are your libraries full of tears?

I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.   
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.   

Nuestra Herencia: Senior Legacy Project at El Paseo Community Garden, On the Real Film

watch it

Nuestra Herencia

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An Invitation for Wildness, Happen Films

watch it

Non-action as a forest-gardener, sun tzu sort of thing

As a forest gardener one of the things that you do come to realise is that you're a bit-player, you're not the main driver out there, and that really your responsibility becomes learning more about how that works, stepping back, being a bit more relaxed about the whole thing and just watching those processes. And even changing the way that you think about harvest and about what you eat or what you need from your garden and so your diet could change as ours has, and rather than looking to eat lettuces we might each alexanders or a perrenial french sorrel.

The more intervention you make, the more mistakes you're likely to make

time-code for story about weed management

The opportunities that need people, its the opposite of industrialisation or intensification where you need hardly any people because machines are doing it, herbicides are doing it. Putting people back into an environment, help them to make it worthwhile and healthy 

Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles

Material Metaphors p18

Research in Experimental Documents (RED) team at Xerox PARC, including Anne Balsamo and Richard Gold.

Where is this https://www.academia.edu/9759064/the_what_of_XFR_eXperiments_in_the_future_of_reading (found this one)

Where is this https://www.academia.edu/9759063/The_methods_of_our_madness_research_on_experimental_documents

It aint what you do it's the way that you do it

Technotexts p25

Further reading mentioned in this:

Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel, Milorad Pavic

Always Coming Home, Ursula LeGuin

High Tension, Paul Zimmerman

Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Espen Aarseth

Cent Mille Milliards, Raymond Queneau

Afternoon, a story, Michael Joyce (where?)

Hypertext has at a minimum the three characteristics of MULTIPLE READING PATHS, CHUNKED TEXT, and some kind of LINKING MECHANISM

What about a text with only two of these characteristics, or just one? Multiple reading paths and chunked text, but no links? Chunked text and links, but only one reading path? Links without chunked text?

Reflexive Loops

N Kate includes the phrase reflexive loops in her definition of technotexts which is v interesting. A text that creates a feedback loop by connecting the nodes of materiality and inscribed constructions (avoiding the words form and content? which is great if that's what she's doing) necessarily can achieve more than a text that doesn't. Feedback of information at the moment makes me think of emergent complexity, eg video feedback as described by Douglas Hofstadter in I Am A Strange Loop, example here and here. Or in the audio world, Karplus Strong synthesis or other techniques that use feedback to an extent that the initial inputs become irrelevant, the emergent sound (or video, or text) having its own properties. Also the recording surface of the body without organs. How can the process of recording and inscribing be creative and what is created or emerges from it? Why does a self-referencing iframe not infinitely loop and crash my machine?

The true difference in nature is not between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, but between the real machinic element, which constitutes desiring-production, and the structural whole of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, which merely forms a myth and its variants

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus p.102

The Future of Writing, Vilem Flusser

                          





image



                                                  space




                                                                 linear






                                      the grass



             text






                            [https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm#link2H_4_0087 eternal return]




                                                                sound








[[#eternalreturn |eternal return]]




                                                                                                     ‘Well! Once more!’


                                   music


                                       
‘Was THAT—life?’ will I say unto death. 


                                                                  [[#eternalreturn |eternal return]]

As We May Think, Vannevar Bush

(from the Life magazine reproduction, September 1945)

• Image: The scientist recording an experiment with a "universal-focus lens" in 1945 was presumably an optimistic or hopeful one, and the title and subtitle seem to follow along with this but for me the idea of "universal-focus" is terrifying and presumably for many people today at least unrealistic. A jpeg (which this article probably isnt, but most likely uses a similar compression format) does not have a universal focus but rather makes compromises (thinking or cognition?) on how much to represent, the resolution and also the frequency of information to represent. Like the human eye it was designed for, the compression algorhythm ignores high frequency data. Alias, the "universal-focus lens" seems to me an unrealistic and unwanted dream.

Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile.

Who should witness them? What is witnessing? When you witness a document you write your name on it. "Witness" comes from wit as in knowledge.

Electrical contacts have ceased to stick when thoroughly understood.

Does understanding (observing) affect the world? Is reading a form of writing?

• Image: A scientist smoking a pipe and holding a large cylindrical flask half full of liquid. They are looking into the flask and attempting to keep a serious face while trying desperately to remember if it is the top or the bottom of the meniscus that should be read. The pipe greatly assists in this attempt as it forces the scientist to keep their lips tightly pursed. This image shows, much more clearly that the previous one, the artefacts of fourier space compression; a splash of high frequency here, a dab of low frequency there, the algorithm's fingerprints poured into its work.

Under [Vannevar Bush's] direction 6,000 scientists worked on such projects as the development of radar and the atomic bomb.

Between the original publishing of this article in the Atlantic July 1945 and this version in September 1945 there was one month which was called August 1945 and it had thirty one days including the 6th of August 1945 and the 9th of August 1945. From here Im finished with the opinions of this Little Boy, but I kept reading the images.

• Images: Ex-lax is presented as the goldilocks zone laxative through three images and accompanying text, not like those "fright!" strong laxatives or "sissy" weak laxatives. Just stay centrist and no-one will get spanked!

• Image: The "supersecretary of the coming age" has a big smiley head on it. The line drawing style of the illustration reminds me of operating manuals and assembly instructions. The supersecretary is a tool (hence the big smiley head).

• Image: The Mifflin ad is quite frightening. Perhaps this isnt from the original, but this compressed version of the image looks like the woman has a very intense stare. Maybe this is in relation to the poem she recites to herself (to me?) and her intense body rubbing which seems to contradict the slogan "Rub and relax with Mifflin".

• Image: An eagle in a circle.

• Image: A right foot with three corns.

• Image: Coins I thought but then I read they are awards for watchcraft.

• Image: Sir Walter Raleigh.

• Image: Automobile User's Guide.

• Image: Mechanical pencil.

• Image: Server room with controller which has pressure gauges and VU meters.

• Image: A boy cycles away from his dad, both wave.

• Image: A magazine with a picture of a girl on a bike (the boy's bike?)

• Image: A bag of Richardson's After Dinner Mints.

• Image: Ceci c'est un pipe.

• Image: A girl drinking orange juice, and a bottle of orange juice.

• Image: A tube of paste called Glider.

• Image: A woman smoking indoors.

• Image: A person in their underwear.

• Image: Fudge.

• Image: Robinson Reminders, a pocket memory system (to be used with the mechanical pen?).

• Image: A dog wrappen in a suspender.edit: no a sock garter.

• Image: A shoe that transforms soldiers into businessmen.

• Image: A board game that appears to be a combination of scrabble and pictionary.

• Image: Cute puppies.

• Image: Another woman smoking (location not specified visually).

Near Print and Beyond Paper: Knowing by *.pdf, Lisa Gitelman

Response to Lisa Gitelman Near Print and Beyond Paper.pdf

read it here

PDfs variously partake of the form and fixity of print that other digital  text  formats  frequently  do  not.  

 The  “look  of  printedness,”  as  I  have  called  it,  has  been  separated from paper and mobilized online, even in the process of producing printed books. 

[PDFs] render

Its just a normal PDF.

Finally,  and  at  Adobe’s  instigation,  PDf  1.7  was  adopted  as an open standard by the International Standards Organization in 2008

This would be interesting to study further as an event, what is the context, who were the actors, what were their motivations.

The fixity of print

the  New  York  Times  Information  Bank—another fascinating, short-lived experiment—tried the same kind of thing, but fiche retrieval proved so unreliable that eventually “a person wearing white gloves pulled fiche on demand” and positioned it in front of a video camera.

Tabs opened while reading

123456789

WYSIWYG WYS>WYG WYS<WYG WYS%WYG WYS&WYG WYS|WYG

folding, smelling, tearing, crumpling, shuffling, and wiping

PDfs are indi-vidually bounded and distinct. 

Can a PDF be in itself?

<iframe src="https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/images/9/9b/Response_to_Lisa_Gitelman_Near_Print_and_Beyond_Paper.pdf" />

If  it  is  a  common-place  today  that  words  and  images  and  sounds  are  closer  together  than  they  have  ever  been  before—now  that  all  of  them  come  as  data  strings,  in bits and bytes—nonetheless there are important ways that “as compu-tational  data  structures,  images  differ  radically  and  fundamentally  from  electronic  text.”85  The  big  difference,  as  Kirschenbaum  explains,  is  that  unlike digital text, “images remain largely opaque to the algorithmic eyes of the machine.”

9 Not quite text (from a reader’s standpoint) and not entirely image (at the scanner), barcodes like these require a fixity that makes them perfect  content  for  PDfs  as  well  as  for  paper.  So  the  document  persists.  

What is the difference between "Portable Document Format Reference Manual" by Adobe Systems and "Beyond Paper: The Official Guide to Adobe Acrobat" by Patrick Ames?

More tabs

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An Archive of Words, Daniel Rosenberg

read it here

This reminds me of Vuk Cosic's File Extinguisher (which seems to be most easily accessed through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine ironically). The File Extinguisher used to also have a map which unfortunately doesn't seem to be archived. The map as an archive is an interesting document as it primarily locates things in relation to eachother. Where do you put something in the archive, what is beside it, what is it far away from?

It will be the foundation for the history of the epistemol-ogy of our contemporary era.

How does "the epistimology of our contemporary era" have a history? I can only understand this as part of a more general history of epistemology, maybe I'm missing the point.

Thomas Aquinas in Roberto Busa Mallet topic modeling software, can this be used to make a Zipfian distribution? Try on John Dee's Liber Loagaeth for example or some of Hildegard's Lingua Ignota

a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by

the a the a  the the the  the a  the the a  a the a  a the  the  a a the  a the a a  a the  the  a a  the the the  the a  a a a  a the a the a the     the a the the  the the the  a a the     a a a a  a the  a a a the  a     a the the the  a a the  a a a  the     the a a  a a  a a a  the a the a  the the the  a a a the  a  a the a  a  the a a     the  a a a a  a     a a a  a  the a the a  a the a  a  the     the the  a  a a a  a a a  a the  the the a  a  a the a the a the     a the the a  a the a a  a  a the  a a a  a     a a a  a  the a  the a a     the a the the  the the the  a a the  a the a     a the  the a  a a a  a the the  a  a the a     the  the the the     the the the  a the a a  the a a     a the the a  a a  the a  the a the  the the a a the the     the a the a  a the  a the a  a     the the the  a a the a     the  a a a a  a     a a the a  a a the  the a  the a  the a the the     a a the a  a the  a the a  the the  the the a a the the     the a the a  a a a a  a the  a the a a  a a the a  the the the  the a  the  a the a the a the  a the a the a the  a the a the a the     a the a  the the the  the the a  a  a the a  the a the a the the     the a the a  a the  a the a  the the the  a the a a  the a the the  the a  a  a the the the the a  a a a     the the the  the a     the  a a a a  a     a the the a  a a a a  the the the  the a  a  the a the a the the 

the s the u the p the e the r

the Microfiche Concordance  to  Old  English:  The  High-  Frequency  Words.11  This  marks  a  no-table development in the history of computer- generated concordances

No-table lol.

Ability of Google Search et al to understand or interpret natural language is super interesting. A search algorithm doesn't have the same logic of interpretation as a human, it finds meaning in other places and finds other meanings. Presumably corporate aims are to make this logic emulate human meaninging as much as possible to make it an efficient tool, but it's interesting to think about the alternative knowledge a meaning-making machine could find.

Example of a nested figure with captions. Daniel Rosenberg "An Archive of Words" Science in the Archives: Pasts Presents, Futures, 2017: p.282, University of Chicago Press

Concordance of indeclinables, John of Segovia

It was a forest of words

Strongs Concordance and other concordances of the Bible are aggregated here. A concordance is an external text which creates links within it's target text. This site as an aggregated concordance then creates links between the entries of different concordances, referring to the same target text.

Further reading

Paul Tasman, “Literary Data Processing,” IBM Journal of Research and Development 1, no. 3 1957
Franco Moretti, Distant Reading;
Steven Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (November 1, 2009): 1– 21;
Heather Love, “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 371– 91;
New Ways of Reading Lev Manovich, “The Database as Symbolic Form,” Convergence5, no. 2 (June 1999): 80– 99;
Geoffrey C. Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences (Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)
An Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time to the Present
Barbara Flood, Historical note: The start of a stop list at biological abstracts

Biological Abstracts’ Subject in Context (BASIC) 1961 BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) 1964

The Internet may feel like a universal archive. In fact, it is more like a textual archipelago. 

Universality in Elementary Cellular Automata, Matthew Cook

Because a system is universal, some of its properties are undecidable (will it become periodic, will a particular sequence occur)

Because Turing machines are universal, if a compiler exists that can compile any data and program from a turing machine to another computer, then that computer is also universal

Tag systems are universal ACDABBE --> DABBECCDD

Cyclic tag systems can only have a two letter alphabet {Y,N}, but they can emulate tag systems so are also universal.

A glider system from Matthew Cook's paper 'Universality in Elementary Cellular Automata'

A glider system (see image) is a system of moving particles called gliders. In the image you can see diagonal lines which interact with vertical lines (the tape head or data) in the centre, emulating a cyclic tag system. The glider system is running an emulation of the cyclic tag system, which is running an emulation of the tag system. In a way this looks like a vector system to me, of interacting vectors rather than flipping bits.

Lastly you run an emulation of the glider system inside rule 110.

-

Fabric version of this could be really interesting. If you got a round loom with 14n pins (a flat loom maybe would be more flexible, to decide different sizes), you could knit a hat or sock program. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOTIAmg0Iow Or does it need to be woven? No idea.

The piece should be a ring so the ends more obviously loop back on themselves. Re: slow computing, computation as labour, This Work of Body / This Body of Work, Meghan Clarke https://www.designacademy.nl/p/study-at-dae/graduation-show/graduation-projects/meghan-clarke Talk to Daniela about double sided knitting, re binary knitting and ternary knitting. So the knitting is the computation; knit the first line of the program then knit further to get the output. A little similar to a quipu, although probably a less efficient system. Are quipus universal?

Programming some A gliders into 110, of increasing width from left to right.

What can you compute on rule 110 (apart from everything)? Can you write a hello world script on a rule 110 computer? Can you add 2+2? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKnSRw_X2w4

First attempts here at coding in the p5.js version of 110 with a few A gliders of increasing widths. Even experimenting on the javascript version of this is so slow, doing this in playing cards or knitting would be incredibly slow. But if it's a statement about computational labour the slowness reveals that.

Stopped at page 13 for now.

The Future Looms, Sadie Plant

Characters in this paper in order of appearance:

• Sadie Plant
• Mallory
• Ada Byron ("the Queen of Engines")
• The Prime Minister
• William Gibson
• Bruce Sterling
• Ada Lovelace ("the Queen of Engines")
• The Difference Engine
• Luce Irigaray
• The computer
• The loom
• The patriarchal present
• The end of human history
• Freud
• Woman
• Man
• Charles Babbage
• Lady Byron ("the Princess of Parallelograms")
• Sophia Frend
• Moore
• Mary Somerville
• Dr Dionysus Lardner
• The Mechanics Institute
• Menabrea
• The Analytical Engine
• That Brain of mine
• William Carpenter
• The Devil
• Babbage's fairy
• Her three children
• Her husband
• Her mother
• A Snail-Shell
• A Molecular Laboratory
• A.K.
• Morrison
• Morrison
• Jacquard
• Jacquard's cards
• the Jacquard loom
• Weaving
• the drawloom
• the China of 1000BC
• the complex designs common in the silks of this period
• one historian
• half the threads of the warp
• the other
• the hands
• the shuttle
• the thread
• the woof
• Fernand Bruadel
• the Middle Ages
• the artificial memories of the printed page
• Basyle Bouchon
• Falcon, inventor of the punch card
• the relentless drive to perfect the punch card system
• the Second World War
• the Allied military machine
• Howard Aiken
• Mark 1 ("the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator")
• Konrad Zuse
• the Z-3
• the Z-11
• Captain Grace Murray Hopper ("the 'Ada Lovelace' of Mark 1")
• her husband
• the war
• the first high-computer language COBOL
• the term "bug"
• Norbert Wiener
• the governor
• the cybernetic system
• the Turing Machine
• Turing
• Manuel de Landa
• the decentralized flow of control
• Allan Newell
• "demons"
• "Pandemonium"
• Alan Kay
• Neith, the Egyptian divinity of weaving
• Lucie Lamy
• the fate of cottage industries in the Midlands and North of England
• Lord Byron
• the Frame-Work Bill
• the processes which relocated and redefined control
• Athena
• Isis
• the wife
• her husband
• Margaret Mead
• The disruption of family relations caused by the introduction of mechanics
• the mother
• the strange fluidities of the material
• Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche
• his/the mother
• the appearance and the possibility of simulation
• the screen, the interface, the messenger
• Marshall McLuhan
• Quentin Fiore
• the patrilineal demand for the reproduction of the same
• Thom Jurek
• Larry McCaffrey
• the materiality of the data space
• this actual space
• the disguises
• Neuromancer's cowboy, Case
• a vast thing, beyond knowing
• the mimic
• herself
• the faults of Nature
• her own veils ("her camouflage")
• the terrifying virtuality of the natural
• Michael Heim
• Helsel
• Roth
• the 'subject'
• science, machine, woman
• Misogyny and technophobia
• the end of the twentieth century
• a proliferation of screens, lines of communication, media, interfaces, and simulations
• Cybernetic feminism
• "her own"
• the interface
• another woman
• Darwin
• Footnotes ("the marginal zones")
• "A.A.L."
• the United States Defence Department
• ADA
• her own name

Ada Lovelace often described her strange intimacy with death... it was no wonder that she was so attracted to the unfamiliar expanses of mathematical worlds.

This story starts mostly with a character assessment of Ada Lovelace as sadgirl.

There is no finite line of demarcation which limits the powers of the Analytical Engine. These powers are co-extensive with our knowledge of the laws of analysis itself, and need be bounded only by our acquaintance with the latter.

Quote from Ada Lovelace. Quite utopian, but I see where the excitement comes from. Outside of a mathematical definition of "limits", there are plenty of limits on the Analytical Engine like quantity of punchcards, computation speed, weight, location, networking capabilities, no USB-C ports, it never existed, etc.

the Analytical Engine weaves Agebraical patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

Quote from Ada Lovelace. Interesting that she says the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves, as opposed to thread and yarn. Are all machines running simulations? Certainly these two early examples look like they are.

Basyle Bouchon and Jacques de Vaucanson were two other inventors in the 18éme siecle who invented punched paper roll and the lathe and le Canard Digérateur.

the punch card gave the Analytical Engine foresight

the Analytical Engine will possess a library of its own

Grace Hopper introduced the term "bug" after she found a dead moth interrupting the smooth circuits of Mark 1.

Only after the introduction of silicon in the 1960s did the decentralized flow of control become an issue, eventually allowing for systems in which "control is always captured by whatever production happens to have its conditions satisfied by the current workspace contents."

How does this distribution of control work in other situations?

Pandemonium is the realm of the self-organising system, the self-arousing machine: systems of control and synthetic intellegence... only with the cybernetic system does self-control no longer entail being placed beneath or under something: there is no "self" to control man#, machine or any other system... the possibility of activity without centralised control, an acency, of sorts, which has no need of a subject position

I guess that answers my question.

"Mechanisation saves time and labour" how does this relate to the labour (and time) of craft, the labour of decoration re Marian Bantjes and William Morris? If artists are not the decorators, who will they be? Re: crappy print.

Who are the women? Those who weave.

A computer that passes the Turning test is always more than a human intelligence, simulation always takes the mimic over the brink.

The Brain Project

permacomputing/ Principles

Available https://permacomputing.net/Principles/

There are a lot of individual principles in this booklet I agree with (shortened below):

• "Avoid pseudosimplicity"

• "Low complexity is beautiful"

• "Abundance thinking". I have some reservations about the post-scarcity reference in this context but mostly this seems like a good spin on that idea.

• "Design for descent". This feels a little like a prepper thing to say, which I think may be veering towards conspiracy theories (and also not in my opinion a healthy attitude towards how to solve urgent existential threats in our ecosystem). On the other hand the anti-economic message this might be suggesting is a great idea, and maybe a more specific idea I would agree with is design for deflation.

• "Keep it flexible". This entire section I agree with strongly. "In an ideal and elegant system, the three factors (smallness, simplicity and flexibility) support each other." This modularity idea is shown best by (some) computer systems, and I think in fact could be implemented in other aspects of society/permaculture to good effect. Of course this also makes we want to make more modular synths.

• "Grow roots to a solid ground". This is a much nicer phrasing than "build on a solid ground", showing the work put in by the organism to reach the solid ground. And also the way it integrates itself into the ecosystem (roots binding the soil are part of what makes the ground solid).

• "Amplify awareness".

• "You dont need to twiddle with everything in order to understand it".

• "Nothing is 'universal'. Even computers, 'universal calculators' that can be readapted to any task, are full of quirks that stem from the cultures that created them. Don't take them as the only way things can be, or as the most 'rational' or 'advanced' way."

• "Strict utilitarianism impoverishes. Uselessness also has an important place, so appreciate it".

• "Think about technology as a rhizome rather than a highway of progress and constant obsolescence".

-

On the other hand I wonder about the overall implication of this shift in approach to computing. Presumably this change in principles is intended to have an effect on computing, the earth and people (the biosphere?). Some of the thoughts in these principles sound anti-progress or anti-learning. Of course a part of this is necessary to achieve sustainability (anti-growth, anti-capitalism, anti-inflation), but to me there also seems to be a risk of stagnation in this idea. "Intelligence amplification was a good goal", are they suggesting we should give up on this goal, that there is enough intelligence in the ecosystem? Or maybe it is not anti-progress but they are suggesting it didnt work? Either way I disagree and think computers have more to offer as intelligence-amplifiers.

-

Some individual principles that may be problematic:

• "Planned longevity". I get that this is as opposed to planned obsolescence, but other things that we have created recently with long life spans (and half-lives) are proving to be quite problematic, so I think this should be approached with caution.

• "Dependencies should be kept low". This is not how an ecosystem works. Maybe a more useful idea would be to keep dependencies small and modular, or to keep dependencies flexible (through standardised interfaces and interactions, and clear, translatable communication).

• "Human scale: A reasonable level of complexity for a computing system is that it can be entirely understood by a single person." This seems like an arbitrary measurement at best, and more likely an applied anthropocentric limit. There are plenty of things in the ecosystem that are too complicated for one human to understand (or care for).

• "Dont take anything for granted. Especially don't expect the infrastructure such as the power grid and global networking to continue working indefinitely." Again sounding a bit like preppers here. I get that the condition of the earth is in decline and on a disastrous course but should there be a space for that thought in a list of principles for permaculture/permacomputing? From another point of view, the idea of not taking anything for granted brings me back to my point about dependencies, surely a healthy ecosystem should be full of them.

On Radar, scientific progress and the Coronavirus, an Interview with Alan Kay

watch it

Computing is Reading, Daniel Punday

E-books, Libraries and Feelies

read it here

Topography and book design in e books. What is currently possible? What should be possible?

Jonathan Franzen claims that if books are not permanent there can be no justice system or responsible self government. This seems like an outrageous claim to me, what does he mean by that? Interested to understand.

"The link between the individual book and the larger body of text": Is this an interface? What connects the book to the larger body? Is it an interspace? What is between books and libraries? What's between a webpage and a website? What's between a codex and the project Xanadu? "books are independent of libraries" how does this relate to their interspace?

Alberto Manguel, a history of reading: "rescue the book from the category to which it has been condemned"

Programming languages depend on their libraries; if they change or disappear the program can become erratic or fail. Does this happen to hypertexts? These dependancies happen whenever the institution or mechanism achieves a critical mass of acceptance.

Is there an argument for discrete autonomous action? Individuality and individuals?

This paper seems to be correlating modular libraries with closed software, that doesn't seem like a necessary path to follow although it does sound like reality.

Robert Filieu ample food for stupid thought: Book as collection of postcards (is this a book or a library?)

The monster at the end of this book - sesame Street as meta fiction

design innovation is not a modernist tangent to the history of the book but rather a fundamental part of publication

"It is the nature of modular libraries to insist on the uniformity of its members" this seems to contracting the image example previously given off iTunes, which clearly shows music, movies, mobile applications, artwork. Do all modular systems insist on uniformity? a modular synthesiser insists on a shared language such as cv or audio, and usually shared physical dimension (eg 3u height in eueorack). But often rules are broken, and modules from one system can even interact with those from another. So if a shared language or methods of interaction can be used, the modules can become more free while retaining the ability to collaborate. Communication allows for the expression (and fulfilment) of needs and desires.

"people who are really serious about software should invent their own hardware" Alan Kay (inventor of the dynabook)

Bandersnatch episode of Black Mirror as an example of the text in collaboration with the modular library: Netflix used additional features not usually seen (were these ever used elsewhere?) to provide a unique experience for a single episode. Are all institutions evil all the time?

Emulation is mentioned as a powerful tool against modular systems becoming redundant: Because it is a system, one emulator can let me play all Nintendo64 games

'reading’— even the reading of a first paragraph—is always reading as

Above quoted from Peter Rabinowitz. I like this term reading as. I think sweet pete means "reading as fiction" or "reading as a magazine", but there is also "reading as a machine", "reading as my mother when she was a young girl" and "reading as sport". But essentially the same thing, how much of the information is in the context, whether it is genre, format or collection (both library categories?) or other implications from systems like assumed or implied intentions of the author, or other extra-textual (extrabiblical? is this still in the text?) information. There is in fact a word for this now that I think about it. Con-text.

In their introduction to Cultures of Collecting, John Elsner and Roger Cardinal assert, “Classification precedes collection.

Is this always true? The opposite seems more obvious to me, collect then classify. Is classifying things you dont have a type of desire? I name it and categorise it in order to objectify it, and ultimately collect it. This sounds a little scary. If you already own things (can people own things?) then it makes more sense to classify them. I classify all my stuff so I can know what is where, it facilitates navigation.

"People want to own their music."

Quote from Steve Jobs. True though, everyone wants to own the music. Who owns Let's Get it On? Who owns chord progressions? Culturally collected knowledge is part of a library which should be accessible to everyone and functional as a reference tool, but that doesn't mean plagiarism is ok (A. Neely, 2022). But is plagiarism ok? Sometimes in music I want you to work out the reference yourself instead of telling you, it's part of the experience. If you told me a joke, explicitly showing the reference might make it not funny anymore. Imagine Gravity's Rainbow had footnotes. Not funny anymore.

But we need to keep alive the ability for books— even in an electronic environment— to break the design rules that the library might impose on them.

I feel that danny boy is implying that this responsibility is on the shoulders of the library designer, the corporation that makes kindles, the software developers. But surely the whole idea of breaking the rules is always something that emerges from the individual? It's the individual book that makes a choice not to follow, not to fit into the library shelves. Otherwise no rules are being broken and that doesn't sound very fun. The system has changed an revolution is no longer possible sounds like an illusion to me. This makes me think of some of the actions published by Vulfpeck against Spotify.

In this model, an e- book would actually be a combination of two different elements: a general data file (say, in the EPub or some other open format) and a designed interface for reading that data file.

This sounds sort of impractical to me. Every book has a "designed interface", but not everyone wants to design an interface for their books. Also the idea that the library structure (eg Kindle) can choose to ignore this interface seems to me to completely negate the point of the interface in the first place, why would Amazon choose to use the interface in that case? There are already more flexible formats (pdf for exaxmple) that Kindles have chosen not to use. Perhaps Dano is thinking of a CSS sort of model, where two things happen: the client device can ignore the stylesheets (and make mistakes) and also media queries allow the server to suggest adaptations for different devices, and also acknowledge that reading situations are different. Sure the author or typographer might have some wild ideas about how to render the text to get the fully integrated experience with layers of meaning, but are they taking into account that one of their readers is a dog with a dot matrix printer? Doom is a great example of this done well, because you can play Doom on anything.

Pearson argues for “books beyond texts”— that is, we should separate the physical object of the book and the text that it contains

Sounds like dreaming of content without form? Is this essay maybe struggling a little with the more abstract forms of digital files? Just because something is on a computer doesn't mean it is possible to extract an essence from it and remove the structures around it. This seems completely impossible to me, and I would question whether there is even such a thing as platonic ideals (no reference given here because I made this up completely by myself).

I see no reason to insist on standardization for the designed elements of reader experience

Ok here are a few reasons of the top of my head:

1. to encourage increased legibility and usability for readers with impaired reading abilities (eg NALA Guidelines).
2. to avoid harm to readers who could be negatively affected by certain design choices such as those with photosensitive epilepsy (eg The Harding Test)
3. to discourage design strategies that are exclusive of or cause damage to (explicitly or otherwise) a specific ethnicity, gender, religion, etc.

Again this line seems to be missing a crucial point for me, you cant separate form from content.

Once libraries lose their connection to these physical objects and the accidental life history that Manguel describes, it may be that the idea of the library itself may cease to have its same cultural meaning.

The library as a trophy. Is a trophy a tool? Some sort of status symbol that perpetuates or maybe even generates power? I understand that this is the use of some library tools but it seems to me that Dan is implying it is the main use. What about research and discovery, and sharing? He also says a (personal) library is for books you have already read. I have never added a book to my library that I have already read, and if someone gave me a book I had already read I would give it away, not add it to my library. Anyway at very least he seems to think this "idea of the library" is possibly doomed, hopefully he is right.

FullControl GCode Designer, Andrew Gleadall

Paper available here

fullcontrolgcode.com main site

and also fullcontrol.xyz parametric models

Python version coming soon too apparently.

In contrast to design approaches that provide design freedom by excluding manufacturing considerations, this study presents a generic framework for users to explore the design space for structures that can only be achieved by coupling the designed geometry with the manufacturing procedure.

This is an interesting philosophy.

the approach presented here is the first generic framework (i.e. it is not limited to a particular type of print-path or print procedure) developed for the unconstrained design of print-paths and associated printing parameters

Well that sounds cool right? Generic framework, small sharp tools? Definitely sounds sharp anyway but will read on and see how small it is.

In the FullControl design approach, a practical framework has been developed which allows the print-path to be explicitly defined along with all parameters for each individual segment of the print-path, including:
• Direction
• Print speed
• Extrusion rate (controlling extrudate height/width) or set as a non-extruding ‘travel’ movement
• Material choice (or print head/tool number)
• Other relevant parameters (e.g. acceleration/jerk, nozzle temperature, bed temperature, fan speed)

Jerk is a hilarious name for a physical rate. This is the change in acceleration with respect to time, or the third derivative of position (measured in metres per second per second per second). In case anyone is wondering the next three derivatives of position are called snap, crackle and pop. More information on jerk in relation to manufacturing from Wikipedia:

Jerk is an important consideration in manufacturing processes. Rapid changes in acceleration of a cutting tool can lead to premature tool wear and result in uneven cuts; consequently, modern motion controllers include jerk limitation features. In mechanical engineering, jerk, in addition to velocity and acceleration, is considered in the development of cam profiles because of tribological implications and the ability of the actuated body to follow the cam profile without chatter. Jerk is often considered when vibration is a concern. A device that measures jerk is called a "jerkmeter".

Is it possible to define acceleration or jerk in a gcode command? That's cool if true, I thought GCode could only do speed. If the GCode is sending such complicated derivatives, how is the printer converting these to actual movements? I feel like there must be an a2d conversion somewhere.

the potential to also include non-geometric GCode text strings

This paper is so cheeky. What are non-geometric GCode text strings? I have been sucked in to the narrative and am eagerly anticipating its resolution. Does non-geometric mean non-Euclidian? Or just outside the realms of geometry, like nozzle temperature?

The FullControl design approach also enables freedom beyond geometric print-path design. Extrusion rate and speed were continuously varied in a recent study [31] to achieve five different graded lattice geometries for an identical print-path (Figure 1E). In the FullControl design approach, it is also possible to parametrically vary retraction, temperature, acceleration and any other parameter that can be controlled with GCode. The GCode is generated in the same format as that produced by slicers and it is possible including advanced firmware algorithms and associated settings for compatible printers (e.g. by inserting an “M900 K0.18” command to adjust ‘linear advance’ settings).

Wowwahweewah

Stopped at page 5 for today.

Jane Austen on Python, Lacey Williams Henschel

A lot of interesting things in this about writing style. It might be interesting to also compare Robert Bringhurst's 'Elements of Typographic Style' to the English and Python style guides mentioned in this.

Links from this article that seem interesting:

https://peps.python.org/pep-0008/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure#Freytag's_pyramid

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/10/20/141554113/a-coconut-cake-from-emily-dickinson-reclusive-poet-passionate-baker

https://peps.python.org/pep-0257/

https://tei-c.org/

https://www.worldshakesbib.org/

https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/

The Shape of Things, Vilém Flusser

The Non-Thing 1 (p85)

immaterial information

Again with the separating content from form, when will you learn? When will you learn that your thoughts have consequences? Lady Anne Conway said (The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy.):

Creatures were in one sence from Eternity, and in another sence not from Eternity

For me it can be useful to think of information on its own but to fundamentally separate it from matter makes no sense imo. I am therefore I think, Plato existed and then thought about things.

This throw-away material, all those lighters, razors, pens, plastic bottles, are not true things; one cannot hold on to them... All things will lose their value, and all values will be transformed into information.

This dismissal of the physical world seems really dangerous to me, and not very realistic. Again makes me think of Anne Conway and the pain she physically felt:

Moreover, Why is the Spirit or Soul so passible in corporal Pains? For if when it is united with the Body, it hath nothing of Corporeity, or a bodily Nature, Why is it grieved or wounded when the Body is wounded, which is quite of a different Nature? For seeing the Soul can so easily penetrate the Body, How can any Corporeal Thing hurt it?

If you keep throwing away all your lighters, razors, pens, plastic bottles, someone is going to get hurt.

The only things left of his hands are the tips of his fingers, which he uses to tap on keys so as to play with symbols. The new human being is not a man of action anymore but a player: homo ludens as opposed to homo faber. Life is no longer a drama for him but a performance.

What is the difference between a drama and a performance? And if you only have fingers what connects them to your wrists?

The Non-Thing 2 (p90)

The liberation of software from hardware

Maybe I need to read Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game to understand this, but from my point of view just because you can move software from one piece of hardware to another doesn't mean that software can exist outside of hardware. If the future is full of non-things, what are the humans pressing with their fingertips?

This future everyone keeps talking about sounds incredible.

Carpets (p95)

The cave, the womb of the mountains, is our dwelling.

What troglodytes still believe this nonsense, why is it still in the stories. Linnaeus and his damn categories again. My ancestors lived in tents and sometimes I go to the beach and don't write down anything I did there.

Nothing human is natural. That which is natural about us is inhuman.

Ugg

Knotting itself is not a fluid process but a jerky one

Snap, I thought threads were vector. Just because something has jerk doesnt mean it is discontinuous. The finished carpet has the appearance of edges and boundaries but the knots (and the hidden warp) can still be followed back along their paths. Particles are just a simplified way of explaining the vibration and paths of strings.

The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges

in the Library nonsense is the
norm

Also Borges dj name: dhcmrlcht-dj

To speak is to fall into tautology

Vade mecum: (Latin for "go with me") has long been used of manuals or guidebooks sufficiently compact to be carried in a deep pocket, and it would sometimes appear in the title of such works, as with one of the earliest known uses of the phrase in the title of the 1629 volume Vade Mecum: A Manuall of Essayes Morrall, Theologicall. From the beginning, it has also been used for constant companions that are carried about by a person, such as gold, medications, and memorized gems of wisdom. But these days, vade mecum is primarily encountered in reference to works which are intended to serve as one-stop references or guides to a particular subject, whether or not such a work can actually be carried in one's pocket (a moot distinction, perhaps, in an age when such works can easily reside in a smartphone's memory). (Mirriam Webster)

Concrete Poems, Nick Montfort

watch it here

Why 160 character limit (SMS, Twitter, etc)? Based on 80 column line length of telex, selectrix, vt100, and even 1928 IBM punch cards. Maybe based on the size of the dollar bill in the late 19th century. Tests with postcards also revealed most were within 160 characters.

Why gridded typography? From tabular lining numerals, early 1800s? What about older examples of gridded writing like Liber Loageath in 1583? Sumerian cuneiform often in seperate boxes (not gridded though), possibly relating to enumeration as well?

And the throne of his glory was established in it, this one on which his unrevealable name is inscribed, on the tablet [...] one is the word, the Father of the light of everything, he who came forth from the silence, while he rests in the silence, he whose name is in an invisible symbol. A hidden, invisible mystery came forth:
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE oooooooooooooooooooooo
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO 

From the Gospel of the Egyptians in Nag Hammadi Library, metaphysical power and mystery of repetition. Nicky credits the typewriter as the most important fixed width type machine or interface, as an influence on the monospace grid on the computer (screen). On proportional type "You could do this in the 15th century, it's not new!".

Steve McCaffrey Carnival

Baudot code

NM talking about his computer generated poetry:

I think of that text as material, sometimes its an interesting material not just to see and to scroll by, but sometimes its an interesting material to comprehend, to see in a mass, but also to sample and to look at... its not always my goal to create something that's worth reading.

Etymology of the work "Network", Keith Briggs

read it here

A work taking the form of a net. A network is a work.

Not anie damzell, which her vaunteth most
In skilfull knitting of soft silken twyne;
Nor anie skil'd in workmanship embost;
Nor anie skil'd in loupes of fingring fine,
Might in their diuers cunning euer dare,
With this so curious networke to compare.

from Muiopotmos, or The Fate of the Butterflie, by Edmund Spenser

opus reticulatum

Brickwork pattern.

Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici

Introduction

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds me thought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

(Caliban in The Tempest, William Shakespeare)

Obeah: an ancestral, inherited tradition of Akan witches of Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Togo and their descendants in the African diaspora of the Caribbean. (from Wikipedia)

Further reading from this chapter: Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly The Death of Nature Carolyn Merchant LArcano della Riproduzione Leopoldina Fortunati The moon, the sun and the witches Irene Silverblatt Natural Rebels Hilary Beckles Patriarchy and Accumulation on a world scale Maria Mies

Michel Foucault and the body

To revalorise the body [taking the form of] the quest for non dualistic forms of knowledge

Capitalism, as a social-economic system, is necessarily committed to racism and sexism

If capitalism has been able to reproduce itself it is only because of the web of inequalities that it has built into the body of the world proletariat, and because of its capacity to globalize exploitation.

All the World Needs a Jolt p.13

The manifold, invisible forms of resistance, for which subjugated peasants have been famous in all times and places: 'foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, feigned ignorance, desertion, pilfering, smuggling, poaching...'

everyday forms of resistance

‡ This reminds me of the stories of French resistance during WWII, which involved sabotage, strike, and general nuisancery. These form of anti-productive resistance are obviously great tools against economically driven capitalism but in these two instances show they can be used against any power structure controlling (or even benefiting from) production.

The difficulty of enforcing the medieval 'social contract,' and the the variety of battlefields available to a combative tenant or village

The Bare Facts of Ritual, Jonathan Z. Smith

The Bare Facts of Ritual

The scholar lives in the void (sic) that the poet, Borges, has described.

My brain misread this because someone gave me "a void" as a christmas present. It should say "world". This plays fun with the Kafka references later though. The world as a void, a random group of events, things, actions, rules occuring with apparent meaning.

The temple serves as a focusing lens, marking and revealing significance.

epiphantic: of or having the character of an epiphany

The ordinary becomes significant, becomes sacred, simply by being there.

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signals and noise: musical intervals BitSuite Some old questions: Which intervals are musical and which are noise? Is there a line between consnance and dissonance?

ritual is an exercise in the strategy of choice

The coffee ritual: I need my coffee to start the day right. I use ritual tools like a moka pot and specially prepared beans to ground myself before the daily grind. It is a personal ritual where I ignore the coffee farms of Colombia and the aluminium manufacturing in Brescia. I make coffee for me. The beans are already roasted mystically and the focus is on extracting.

the religious symbolism of hunting is that of overcoming the beast who frequently represents either chaos or death.

nature in rituals: nature as chaos

the Fate of Bones:

Bones endure; they are the source of rebirth after death. The bones are a reservoir of life; they require only to be refleshed.

Further reading The Rings of Saturn W. G. Sebald

And we will be required, if society is held to have any sanity at all, to explain it all away.

Or maybe society does not have any sanity at all and that is the explanation? What is sanity? Some sort of objective relationship between thought and the external world, a "correct" way of perceiving nature?

some means of overcoming [the] contradition between 'word and deed.' This, I believe, is one major function of ritual.

Ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled, course of things.

It provides the means for demonstrating that we know what ought to have been done.

These pages are making me think about art (mostly graphic/plastic arts but also performance and music, even writing I suppose) and how they often involve "representations" not of the world as it is but as it could be. For example Malevitch, the idea that pure artistic expression or geometric shapes are somehow more ideal than representation of reality. There's that old ideal/real dualism thing again that keeps getting everyone in trouble. Schoenberg once said "I have made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years". There seems to be an idea that the world of thought is more ideal than the external world. I have thought this idea myself from time to time, or at least my mind has. I wonder what Spinoza would have thought of serialism?

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things...God’s power of thinking is equal to God’s power of acting. 

Spinoza , Ethics II. Pr.7

So if the ritual or art "demonstrates" it is through acting what ought to be the case, acting in the sense of performing, creating, or simply bringing into being. There is no thinking without acting and a ritual is an obvious case of acting according to our thoughts.

Ritual gains its force where incongruency is perceived.

But this article is about the difference between the action of the ritual and actions at other times.

I would also assume that, at some point, he reflects on the difference between his actual killing and the perfection represented by the ceremonial killing.

Why assume that the hunter reflects? Do we reflect on our rituals? Do football fans discuss applying the social relations represented in the match to their own lives as they sit around in the pub afterwards? Do classical music lovers go home from a concert with Beethoven stuck in their head and also the question of why 17th century upper class European music is so globally loved hundreds of years later? People a long time ago were probably just as dumb as people are today.

Further reading James George Frazer (mythology, comparative religion)

The ceremony performed before undertaking an actual hunt demonstrates that the hunter knows full well what ought to transpire if he were in control; the fact that the ceremony is held is eloquent testimony that the hunter knows full well that it will not transpire, that he is not in control.

The phrase "focusing lens" works best for me from this text, the ritual is a perfected version of what will actually happen, an idealised representation of our aspirations for the reality of human life.

Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman

Chapter 7: Defining Games

formal game, by definition, has a winner; and winning is the "end"... It has an agreed set of equipment and of procedural "rules" by which the equipment is manipulated to produce a winning situation.

From David Parlett, The Oxford History of Board Games. The "rules" and even equipment part of this make sense to me, although sometimes the equipment might be very minimal or nothing (is the 100m sprint a game? or hide and seek?). On the other hand the winner/winning part seems a little constrictive to me. While many games involve (and end with) winning, this seems to be missing the point of most games in a broader sense to me. If only one person or team wins, why would so many people want to play games when the odds of losing are so high? Perhaps the possible reward makes it worthwhile but I suspect in most games there is something else to gain for the players than simply winning. However where Parlett is trying to distinguish games and informal play I think this is a useful point as long as it is not over emphasised in other contexts.

Reduced to its formal essence, a game is an activity among two or more independent decision-makers seeking to achieve their objectives in some limiting context.

From Serious Games, Clark C. Abt. As discussed in this section, this definition allows elections, international relations and arguments to be considered games. I think this is missing the same basic point as Dave's definition in that it assumes the objectives of the game are the players' actual main objectives. "It's just a game", "I'm just playing with you". Gameplay implies on some level this is not real life, this might be consequential but it's not the goal. Serious games do exist but I think there is still an understanding that all games are minigames within life, not the main quest. They may be rewarding or satisfying, but the "end" of the game is not an ultimate end.

[play] promotes the formation of social groupings, which tend to surround themselves with secrecy
and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.

From Homo Ludens, Johann Huizinga. Jo seems to be getting closer to the point than the previous two in my opinion, looking at the important social consequences of play. It is maybe important that he is talking about play, not games. There are other consequences or outcomes to play and games that I think he is not mentioning, play as learning, play for money (eg. gambling and professional sports), and maybe play as personal (non-social) therapy. JHuiz implies games are artificial, but if they have consequences IRL then they must at least relate to real life some how, and in my opinion are a part of it even if they are constructed (it's all a game).

 [games are] uncertain: the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained beforehand, and some
latitude for innovations being left to the player's initiative. 

From Man, Play, and Games, Roger Caillois. The uncertainty element seems true to me, and is a good distinction from or comparison to ritual. What happens if you plot different activities/actions on a chart of gameness vs ritualness? Rodge says games are unproductive but I would suggest that they can actually use up resources (especially labour and time), just as rituals often do. "Is there a make-believe element to Tic-Tac-Toe?" Yes of course there is, three x's or o's in a row do not make me win outside of that game, real life is not turn based, etc.

Do all games allow the participants to be playful?

playing a game is the voluntary effort to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

From Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, Bernard Suits. I think Benny is missing the point that the grasshopper is making in the story. Words like "less efficient" and "unnecessary" seem to be implying there is a more efficient way to achieve what making music achieves, or worse maybe even implies it is not needed at all. Maybe this is true in the sense that life is absurd and nothing happens for a reason re:Camus, but I don't think this is what B is getting at. "Lusory attitude": this is a nice idea. "Suits is actually pointing to the way that games create meaning as players accept these rules, goals, and obstacles in order to play."

The Ants & the Grasshopper

One bright day in late autumn a family of Ants were bustling about in the warm sunshine, drying out the grain they had stored up during the summer, when a starving Grasshopper, his fiddle under his arm, came up and humbly begged for a bite to eat.

"What!" cried the Ants in surprise, "haven't you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer?"

"I didn't have time to store up any food," whined the Grasshopper; "I was so busy making music that before I knew it the summer was gone."

The Ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust.

"Making music, were you?" they cried. "Very well; now dance!" And they turned their backs on the Grasshopper and went on with their work.

From Aesop's Fables.

A game is a closed formal system that subjectively represents a subset of reality. By "closed" I mean that the game is complete and self-sufficient as a structure... A game creates a subjective and deliberately simplified representation of emotional reality... The player is actively pursuing some goal. Obstacles prevent him from easily achieving this goal. Conflict is an intrinsic element of all games... Conflict implies danger; danger means risk of harm; harm is undesirable. Therefore, a game is an artifice for providing the psychological experiences of conflict and danger while excluding their physical realizations.

From The Art of Computer Game Design, Chris Crawford. Mmm complete universal games. The simplified representation of emotional reality is an interesting one especially in relation to music or theater; there is certainly a simplified representation of reality but traditionally people consider these ways to explore emotional truths in ways that "reality" cant. The simplifying of reality can in fact draw attention to certain elements and make them more clearly expressed. Lots of parts of this definition make me think of games and (participatory) art as the same or similar things, eg the contrived conflict and obstacles which are a part of lots of formal artistic systems like western harmony. What happens when games lie to you, when you don't feel safe playing a game?

A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal.

From I Have No Words and I Must Design, Greg Costikyan. I think Greg's throwing around of the a-word is what the other definitions were missing for me, and could be a useful way to explore a game's role for the individuals, groups and societies that play it. This also makes me think of the rules of games in general; when I play a board game I not only follow the rules in the rule book, but also more general rules that I know about board games. When I read the rules for a specific card game, there are plenty of words like "tricks" or "suits", terminology and metarules that I need to know in order to play that specific game.

Games are an exercise of voluntary control systems, in which there is a contest between powers, confined by rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome. 

From The Study of Games, Elliot Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith. This definition again is really missing why games are played for me, which is ok I guess but I am really interested in that.

A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a
quantifiable outcome.

The definition of these authors, sounds pretty good to me except the quantifiable outcome part. I get that games often have a quantifiable outcome but I'm not sure it is an essential part of being a game. The Game with Michael Douglas, what a film. "Conflict is central to games". But sometimes the conflict is so artificial and inconsequential in real life that it does not feel like conflict is the right word at all. Overcooked can be very stressful but that is because of the conflict it creates between players attempting to collaborate, does that fit the way the word is being used here? What is the conflict in solitaire or in Tony Hawk's?

Thinking about a game as a puzzle, a game with a correct answer or set of answers, can be a useful way to frame a game. For example, is your 3D adventure game lacking a sense of play? Perhaps it is too puzzle-like

Nice. What is the difference between an adventure game and an RPG? Whether or not the outcome is an ultimate accomplishment, or a clear end point? Sometimes a game can still be played after you complete it, does it shift mode at that point from adventure to role-play?

The terrain along the borders of more rigid definitions offers fertile ground for insight and investigation. In these playful and liminal spaces, assumptions are challenged, ideas evolve, and definitions change.

Further reading Man, Play, and Games, by Roger Caillois.

Get Lamp, Jason Scott

this is a documentary

Typing an adventure game from a program written in a magazine: but you have read the entire thing already this seems so strange! Players drawing maps: rooms and tunnels.

It's like a funhouse ride, youre on rails

The player and the author have an illusion of interacting, it is just an illusion, but when we go to the movies and we watch a movie we dont think we're really in the place the movie was set.

the more I played text adventures the more effective I was at navigating a strange place

Comment from blind player. Text adventure games can (should) be screen scraper friendly. So should websites! Interactive fiction as an educational tool: improves reading comprehension, fluency, and problem solving. Jeremy Douglass (new media). Mary Ann Buckles (video game aesthetics PhD). When you're typing (in a text adventure), the output and input are both words "its the same environment, it's all words, its all thoughts, its all the imagination". Text adventures in the era of ChatGPT: why bother? It can make the world more expansive with less writing. It can leave more elements of the story to "chance". Do I want to play a game written by AI? Is it worth doing?

[2] [3] [4] [5]

Can a game look like a text adventure but not be? Could a game be a concrete poetry text adventure? The Hollow by Greg Jackson. This would be such a cool text adventure, a quest that never gets solved. What happens if the text adventure is tiny and leaves questions unanswered.

Puzzles in IF are sort of an outgrowth of previous challenges between people" eg riddles, chess puzzles, crosswords. Systems of thinking that are slightly off from the everyday

For me the ideal IF game is one which is winnable on the first turn but you dont know what the command is to win it until you've gone all the way through the game and solved it

The quest, Gilgamesh Steve Meretzky (Infocom)

Some IF:

Colossal Cave Adventure Zork Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy the game Planetfall Robert Pinsky - Mindwheel

Tools for developing IF:

Alan IF TADS

Build a text adventure in a Telegram bot, or any chat app.

Text adventure games never died

Hardcore never dies. Why do these people talk in the past tense. 17th century "automaton lounges" are mentioned, what is this? The phrase only has four google results.

Photopia Lost Pig

The xyzzy awards for interactive fiction

Gruescript is a tool for creating point-and-click text adventures which feel like classic 'puzzlebox' games while eliminating the need for the player to type, making the games friendly to modern devices and players. You build your game online and download it as a playable HTML page, which you can host on your own itch.io site or elsewhere.

Andrew Plotkin Emily Short

And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One

IF Wiki

The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Available here

The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas: How the Hegelian Conception of the Domination of the Spirit in History Arose.

This essay is an Idea about the primacy of Materialism which is a little ironic. So I think it is important to look at the "material" context this was written in, which is efficient machines and blighted potatoes. There was no food and no work. If these material conditions change, are these ideas still valuable?

In the full title and towards the end of the essay it also claims to be a rebuke of Hegel and German Ideology, in particular the authors seem to be claiming that the domination of the spirit is in fact the domination of the hegemonic ideas of the ruling class, through their presentation as being in the common interest. Does there have to be a common interest?

Also if you do a search for "domination of the spirit" you get lots of interesting results about dominating (evil) spirits. The idea of control in demonology and the history of witches has a lot to say about domination and spirits.

Freedom is the ideal of the free market.

Well Played, Vicky Osterweil

Read it here.

More articles in this series here.

teens doing the floss while they wait at crosswalks

Does this sentence rhyme?

[Video games] have superseded cinema and TV to be the dominant visual medium of our time.

...video games specifically and culture more generally as a reproductive technology. That means that their major role in capitalist society is not simply to produce profit — although of course they must do that — but also to re-create the order required for this society’s perpetuation. 

Media as reproductive or re-creative: This article doesn't seem to be concerned with the productive and creative aspects of media, games can create or communicate new or different ideas, and can change the balance or composition of ideology in a society. Ideas need to spread and be talked about or exercised in order to be believed, and media are (in a competely literal sense) the way this is done, they mediate.

Where once perhaps mythology, indigenous relationships to habitat or tightly knit communities provided that rationale, under capitalism, mass media — alongside forms of political participation, law, and ownership — have played the role of legitimation.

Mass media is presented here as separate or different to other forms of cultural reproduction, I don't think this is absolutely the case.

Vic seems to be saying cinema -> tv -> games, as par tof the collapse of the 20th century middle class and the attempt of the modenr worker to "try to stay one step ahead of automation and obsolescence". The word entrepreneur could have evolved differently to mean "undertaker", "under" or "entre" seem to imply that the actor is controlled by the action, they are "under" the domination of the taking.

Video games emerge as workers need to engage creatively in the most mundane of tasks to get an edge over fellow workers, glamorizing the violence of competition and the otherwise mundane process of learning arbitrary information and gestures through play. The arc of most games involves getting better and better at recognizing a particular set of patterns and deploying a particular set of skills — activated by button presses — to the point where the actual controls become second nature and the player experiences the fantasy of seamlessly inhabiting the character or scenario she plays with. 

How does this fit with the music of the 21st century? Does it have the same ideals? What about 21st century film/tv shows, art, books? The bit about inhabiting the character is certainly an obviously strong aspect of games that possibly other media dont have. This description really fits speed running. This description really fits learning an instrument or musicking in general. Also learning a sport. In this aspect games seem to be more similar to these actions than the passive media of the 20th century. Was passive media an anomaly, did it exist before the novel?

Workers also need to constantly manage their increasingly anxious and fractured mental health. For this, video games provide a soothing domain of control, power, guaranteed progress, order, and orderly narrative in a world of work and daily life where such guarantees are in short supply.

What about scary games? Or fallout? Maybe they fit this description too I'm not sure.

Video games, then, are the (highly profitable) media of consolation specific to neoliberalism

Media of consolation, nice. If games are all about competition why are there team games, squads? I think the view of capitalism as being synonymous with competition is a bit to simple, there has been competition in plenty of other societies. If the argument is for collaboration over competition (which is a good argument), these might be more useful terms to use directly.

Notes on Deconstructing the Popular, Stuart Hall

In this pad me and Bobi did radical annotation: writing our own version of this essay before reading it, by filling in the gaps between the first and last sentence of alternating paragraphs.

The notion of the people as a purely passive, outline force is a deeply unsocialist perspective.

Maybe even the term "the people" is a bit difficult here, even "the masses" is better because it is plural. "The people" is just one thing, sure it's a nice dream to be united but it's not that nice to hide the multiplicity and differences.

the field of culture as a sort of constant battlefield

A battlefield is I think a destructive place where victories are won through defeating and destroying the opposition. Is this what Stu is saying culture is? If you go somewhere expecting a battle it can make it difficult to have a civilised, productive conversation. And if you want to have a revolution maybe skip the battlefield and have a riot in the middle of the city.

provided commercial popular culture

I think it's surprising that this phrase still makes sense 42 years after Stu originally wrote this. Despite lifestyle brands, customisable coca cola bottles, the internet, tv on demand, the dominant culture still overpowers other cultural production, people still watch hollywood films and wear canada goose jackets just like they have done for hundreds of years. I'm not sure if new media which claim to be more personalised have made a major difference in how hegemonised culture is.

Virtually anything which "the people" have ever done can fall into this list [of the popular culture: the cultures, mores, customs and folkways of "the people"]

I see no issue here except with the word popular. Culture is what people do, that makes sense to me. In the sense of a bacterial culture: a growing or a cultivation, it is just what happens when entities live and die together. Popular though, doesnt fit into this definition.

Its main focus of attention is the relations between culture and questions of hegemony

We guessed this third definition pretty well in our radical annotation.

What matters is not the intrinsic or historically fixed objects of culture, but the state of play in cultural relations: to put it bluntly and in an over simplified form - what counts is the class struggle in and over culture.

This seems to be specifically avoiding or understating the role history has to play in cultural relations (and classes are a part of culture if you ask me). When has tradition ever been valued "for its own sake", tradition is always used as a tool in specific cultural actions and items to create and reinforce identity, assert or challenge dominance, and express existing and desired cultural (class) relations.

The capacity to constitute classes and individuals as a popular force - that is the nature of political and cultural struggle.

Yes for sure buuuuuut a very common way to unite people is to give them a common enemy. Redrawing the lines doesn't get rid of the lines. This whole essay makes me think of the (collateral) damage that is bound to happen in a struggle, a battlefield, and wonder if there is another way. Maybe using big categories like "the people" and "the power-bloc" is having consequences for smaller entities in the culture like for example human beings.

The Player’s Power to Change the Game, Anne-Marie Schleiner

Introduction

Further reading:

Report on the Construction of Situations, Guy Debord.

McKenzie Wark, GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1

Play becomes everything to which it was once opposed. It is work, it is serious, it is morality, it is necessity’ (McKenzie Wark).

Play as essentially separate to "real" life. But:

Huizinga’s search for the elements of play in funerary rites, deadly Sanskrit riddles and pre-juridical Arabian contests presupposes that before modernity relegated play to the magic circle, play was on the loose amidst culture, confusing the rational boundaries of life’s necessary activities with the ridiculous, competitive, and flighty contests of the ludic. As gamification and serious games attest to, in the early
twenty-first century, we may again be witness to a return to a similar savage confluence of the game with everyday life, a blurring of the boundaries between play and world.

What is the relationship between play and reality, or play and truth? Playing is something you can "really" do, but is at the same time often considered "not real".

[Games are often] not taken seriously enough (even as fiction)

Like fiction, or in particular the novel, games perhaps shouldnt always be taken seriously? Surely there is a scale of what is important, what is urgent, what is relatively inconsequencial and unimportant?

Propaganda 2.0, Christian Fuchs

Read as part of DRUG.

Table 6.2: The Online Propaganda Model (PM).

Dimension	Internet
Size, Ownership, Profit Orientation	Concentrated social media markets, concentrated ownership, intransparent and secret algorithms that determine the priorities of how results and news are presented
Advertising	Transnational corporations are able to confront users with targeted ads and content; Native online advertising and branded online content threaten news-media’s-independence; The online advertising-user-spiral increases social media’s power in advertising and as news media and advances monopoly tendencies in the online economy; On social media, users’ digital labour produces a data commodity and is exploited by the platforms in order to sell targeted ad spaces
Sourcing	Traditional news organisations are powerful actors in online news; Online attention as commodity manipulates political communication; Corporations and entertainment dominate social media attention; Political bots distort the political public sphere
Flak, Mediated Lobbying	Bots and other tools for automated lobbying; Social media use by politicians, parties, movements; Online hate speech
Ideologies	Ideologies of the internet; Ideologies on the internet and user-generated ideologies; Algorithmic amplification of online ideologies

Heretic

A person holding an opinion at odds with what is generally accepted.

This article to me seems to be exaggerating the contrast between 20th century media (newspaper, tv, radio, cinema) and 21st century social media (GAFAM). While the similarities are definitely worth checking before you wrecking, I think a wider context is helpful; from other advertising and propaganda platforms (athletes bodies, city walls, elections, protests, family dinner, conversations over cocktails) and also from the cultural differences between 20th and 21st century (different roles of state and corporation, new types of political structure, different balances in global politics). We talked about the telecom infrastructure that underlies all of this; a site of power but also one of less-constructed mediation, so a good place to attempt to reclaim, while being careful not to lose what we've learnt from the existing layers of systems built on them.

Liber de Compositione Alchimiae, Robert of Chester

I am reading this via Justin Sledge's video essay about it.

It is a translation of an Arabic text by Khalid ibn Yazid (maybe, if he was real) and has some really interesting interpretations of the original text (ie lying). For example it traces a genealogy of alchemy that mostly ignores the Arabic tradition and makes it sound like it was passed from pagan scholars to christian ones.

Corrupt or untranslated Arabic words later gain a mystical power, for example "Azoth", which is a corruption of azoc, being originally derived from the Arabic al-zā'būq "the mercury". In alchemy this became both a sort of universal medication and universal solvent.

Europeans have really no idea what [these words] mean, and they are going to back fill that meaning with all kinds of mystical, supernatural and sometimes even magical storytelling.

Wxtch Craft, Silvia Federici

watch here

Targets of the witch hunt often more specifical than just women: healers, queer women; targeting women's power and community. "Gossip" as a term changed from meaning female friendship to meaning idle talk.

When you just make work as a man that is not political you are following a canon, that you didnt have to be aware of because you dont share a struggle around it.

Quote from melanie bonajo on men seeing themslves as neutral.

To change identities you have to begin to change the material condition.

Re: economic devaluation of women's work, despite the fact that procreation is one of the pillars of the capitalist organisation of work. Women's strikes? Happened in the 70s. Dependence of women on the waged worker, dependence of men on wage economy. (Also dependence of children on women/mothers).

The body as a portal and as a tool for resistance. "The first line of resistance is resistance of what is being done to my body". Body as territory (relevant to gender and also slavery abuses). Alienation of women from their own body.

The witchhunt is being thrown into the dustbin of history... The witch has been transformed into a legendary figure... You wouldnt dress up as the prisoner of the Auschwitz camp

Many witchhunts in Africa and India are to do with land dispossession

Pushing women out of the land they have access to, by accusing them of witchcraft. This is a problem today, not in the past. Satanic panic, misfortune is due to the enemy within: often the old woman who lives alone or doesnt want to give up her property/power. The witch-hunt as an object of fantasy (and even tourist attraction) is a dangerous idea.

I think feminists have to protest against that, and against commercialization

The commercialization that has parasitically followed the reclaiming of the image of the witch. Is the witch a good symbol for reclaiming of women's power and rights though? Being a witch historically and in parts of the world today, means being someone who is persecuted.

Witch hunt as relevant to oppression across various dimensions of society:

Nature is seen as opposed to society in capitalism... femininity is women's nature.

Links between feminism and animal rights / climate action.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o Decolonising the Mind. "Attempt to occupy our attention and our mind to prevent critical reflection".

The history of the witch hunt is one of colonisation and slavery

spirituality is a deep need of many communities, if anything the critique needs to be of religious institutions

Wicca and pagan movements as nature oriented movements. But also they do not appeal to witch craft, but rather try to reclaim deeper relationships with the natural world.

I think the magic of the world can be expressed in many ways without taking on a category that has been charged, and that continues to be used [maliciously], lets understand what we are talking about and what is the usefulness of it.

A practice that is associated with killing, destruction and destruction of people's life. Mel notes the difference between the popular belief / symbol and the historically accurate one. Surely this is important? If the popular opinion is historically inaccurate in a way that denies genocide, that seems like an issue?

We need to recuperate other forms of communication. I'm very concerned about the stage in which all the communication that takes place about people, particularly when it comes to  organising struggle etc, is through these very public, open spaces that are dominated by companies that are speculating, that are making immense amounts of money on them, and they can be manipulated immensely. So I think we need some protocol for how to use the media so that their usage is not turned against us.

Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, Silvia Federici

Introduction

the relation between witch-hunting and the increasing enclosure of the female body through the extension of state control over women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity

Witchcraft as an accusation often involves control of bodies, demonic possession, etc; the relationship between the myths and the facts is interesting.

In Tanzania alone, it is calculated that more than five thousand women a year are murdered as witches, some macheted to death, others buried or burned alive.

oh fuck

In a grotesque fashion these reproduce the very stereotypes that were created by the witch hunters and led to the deaths of thousands of women.

How can these women be reframed? The healers, the alchemists, the gossipers? Women with intense power unimaginable to those in charge: real social power, esoteric knowledge, community with each other and with nature. Is reframing or reclaiming the right thing to do with unacceptable symbols? In reference to "witchy" tourism and commerce in europe, Federici seems to be arguing here that the symbol of the witch should be erased. In her KABK interview she had a related reservation about the category of witch being taken on by 21st century, and absolutely has a point that this is a symbol which caused and causes suffering and death for thousands of people. But is her vision of the merchants simply taking "the ugly, sadistically laughing old witch, off their shelves" the best way to deal with this problem? She also mentions that the massacres that have happened are not well remembered, and the crimes have not been apologised for, so I wonder if it may be too soon for the image to disappear. Re holocaust memorials, slavery reparations and Global Corporation Taxes can something similar be done. Can linguistic/symbolic reappropriation attempts be as effective as these actions? Maybe and maybe, reappropriation as a form of rebellion and self-definition.

Memorial of witch trials in Vardø, Norway. This involves a commemorative flame in the most terrifying way.

One

Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, eds. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen

Why Speak of the Witch Hunts Again?

forced them to submit to the patriarchal control of the nuclear family

Re: are Deleuze and Guattari just completely insane? What?

the witch hunt stands at a crossroad of a cluster of social processes that paved the way for the rise of the modern capitalist world.

This was in italics in the original so I assumed it was important. But I do agree actually and think it's important.

Magic and magick: the similarities are important and useful but also they are not the same thing. Art has a (magical) power to enlighten and inform in a way that bare fact cannot. Magick is also about hidden, secret or esoteric knowledge. Forms of knowing and telling and learning that are encoded: why are they encoded? What can they do? Encoding can disguise things and also shows that what is encoded was worth the effort of hiding. Encryption is like ornamentation, Marian Bantjes is a cryptographer. None of this paragraph has anything to do with the text or does it?

Should we not, then, confine ourselves to microhistories that programmatically cut off village events from any links with overarching social structures?

If this conversation is to do with globalisation, then scale seems like it should be an explicit concern. The rhetoric in the quote above implies a binary between looking at the local and global, but in fact to fully understand both and make an informed decision we need an excited zooming in and out repeatedly, crash zoom x10 like in an instagram story.

Isn’t a broader underlying cause called for, connecting and explaining all these different correlations?

Not really! There might just be a buch of stuff happening, but I'll play along. Hopefully Silvia is specifically using this word "correlation" to bait us. But I do feel in general this is the weak point of her argument: she is making a really big claim and that makes it very hard to prove, I want to agree so I do but I dont know if her argument is really convincing.

Witch Hunts, Enclosures, and the Demise of Communal Property Relations

There seems to be, however, a peculiar relationship between the dismantling of communitarian regimes and the demonization of members of the affected communities that makes witch-hunting an effective instrument of economic and social privatization.

Enclosures, Britain (and Ireland)'s obsession with land. "Everyman's right" or freedom to roam is still not a thing in Ireland, the farmers are the backbone of our society. Rack rent: "an extortionate or very high rent, especially an annual rent equivalent to the full value of the property to which it relates". This is some John B Keane shit.

That it was not only the lords but the well-to-do among the peasants who raised the edges (the common form of boundary marking) intensified the hostilities the enclosures produced, as the enclosers and the enclosed knew each other, walked the same paths, and were connected by multiple relations, and the fear that consumed them was fueled by the proximity of their lives and the possibility of retaliation.

If the bad guys were clearly defined we would have eaten them by now.

Older women were most affected by these developments.

Combination of age and gender restrictions: how did it affect older men, younger women? The stereotype of the old female witch seems to be correct from how Federici is describing those affected here, but it would be interesting to expand this to a more full picture. Also the earlier accusations of witch craft, I dont have a reference but I seem to remember a more even gender balance, in particular targeting of politicians? Need to double check.

Religion and the Decline of Magic, Keith Thomas (bad link)

Charter of the Forest is mentioned alongside the Magna Carta as a legal document protecting the rights of widows. Were these documents really used or even imagined the way we picture them now?

Not surprisingly, many so-called witches were poor women

Poor to add to the characteristics of female and elderly (I mean obviously, but just making a note). Although maybe not that obvious because this really confirms that these women were very different from the rich, powerful men accused of witchcraft in earlier times.

at least one-third of the charges recorded by C. L’Estrange Ewen relative to the Home Circuit for the period between 1563 and 1603 were for bewitchment of pigs, cows, horses, geldings, and mares, several to death

The witch is allegedly trying to seize control or power, or at least destroy the power and possessions of others.

women participated in many protests, pulling up the fences that now surrounded the commons. In the witch the authorities simultaneously punished the attack on private property, social insubordination, the propagation of magical beliefs, which presumed the presence of powers they could not control, and the deviation from the sexual norm that now placed sexual behavior and procreation under the rule of the state.

In this sense, we have to think of the enclosures as a broader phenomenon than simply the fencing off of land. We must think of an enclosure of knowledge, of our bodies, and of our relationship to other people and nature.

By the seventeenth century a drastic change was underway, reflected in Descartes’s theory that animals are nonsentient machines. Having companion animals was increasingly treated with suspicion

Really? This makes me think of werewolves also. The reference Federici gives for this paragraph has some really interesting things about trials of a witch, vampire and werewolf, as well as trials of exhumed bodies and bones. Even the 400 year old bones of Thomas à Becket, after being worshiped a s a holy relic, were tried as a traitor by Henry VIII then burned and scattered in the wind.

Witch-Hunting and the Fear of the Power of Women

In europe the first witch (Alice Kyteler 1324?) and the last witch (Helen Duncan 1944?) would be interesting stories to follow and compare.

This involved a historic battle against anything posing a limit to the full exploitation of the laborer, starting with the web of relations that tied the individuals to the natural world, to other people, and to their own bodies. Key to this process was the destruction of the magical conception of the body that had prevailed in the Middle Ages

The magical person, the shaman, the world spirit manifest in the human, vs the beast as nonsentient machine, the brain as computer. Rational and emotional thinking in conflict with each other, separation from nature. Is this in conflict with my eternal struggle against dualism? Not really, it is still possible for everything to be one and for emotion and magic to be part of that one. Just because its magic doesnt mean its supernatural (or extranatural).

precapitalist

Bad word.

Love is the great magician, the demon that unites earth and sky and makes humans so round, so whole in their being, that once united they cannot be defeated.

Maybe a paraphrase from Plato's Symposium. Love as daimon or spirit.

In capitalism, sex can exist but only as a productive force at the service of procreation and the regeneration of the waged/male worker and as a means of social appeasement and compensation for the misery of everyday existence.

How does this translate into modern day capitalism and modern day sexuality? On one side we say we have sexual liberation but on the other side we say we have more repressive and all encompassing forms of capitalism, how do they make sense together?

the courtesans in sixteenth-century Venice who managed to contract marriages with noblemen but were then accused of being witches.

Did capitalism enable social climbing, or did it already exist? If so were these sorts of accusations made in other times? Or did it exist and was accepted?

Then a scary paragraph about torture and public humiliation.

Women were terrorized through fantastic accusations, horrendous torture, and public executions because their social power had to be destroyed

The exaggeration of ‘crimes’ to mythical proportions so as to justify horrendous punishments is an effective means to terrorize a whole society, isolate the victims, discourage resistance, and make masses of people afraid to engage in practices that until then were considered normal.

In relation to McCarthy era anti-commmunism, and the war on terror. What is it that the "terrorists" of the middle east were/are threatening the west with that was so terrifying for them? We are kind of encouraged that it was an excuse to steal oil, but was there something ideological happening as well, a class struggle, an uprising?

On the Meaning of ‘Gossip’

Woo feminist etymological critique time! Honestly one of my favourite times.

a term commonly indicating a close female friend turned into one signifying idle, backbiting talk, that is, talk potentially sowing discord, the opposite of the solidarity that female friendship implies and generates

Attaching a denigrating meaning to the term indicating friendship among women served to destroy the female sociality that had prevailed in the Middle Ages

These two quotes from the first paragraph sum this up pretty neatly, and I think this idea in general works well as a small symbolic idea, so you could just read this and stop. Idea as symbol is really fun, if it is possible for ideas to be symbols can ideas be self referencial symbols? Like the phrase "this word" or actually more like the idea of you (personally) thinking. What about ideas with feedback loops like the idea of you thinking about self referencial symbol-ideas. Anyway, distracting.

They were critical of strong, independent women, and especially of their relations to their husbands, to whom—the accusation went—they preferred their friends.

Oh noooo poor boys the world doesnt revolve around them.

“The tavern,” Wright points out, “was the resort of women of the middle and lower orders who assembled there to drink and gossip.”

Quote from A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England during the Middle Ages, Thomas Wright. The "gossips" are presented in a negative light but even with the more modern meaning of the word the behaviour being described sounds very subjectively bad in the time period, and actually the same behaviour (with the same word?) could still be interpreted as positive, female friendship. Obviously this isnt the way that history played out at the time unfortunately, and the practice of women meeting socially became less acceptable and the word more negative. This is maybe an important detail of how words and norms can subtly shift. Was everyone aware of the shifting perception, was anyone aware of it?

In Italy in the fourteenth century they could still go independently to court to denounce a man if he assaulted or molested them.<pre>

Amazing, this is still barely possible today (in some places). The link between social isolation and loss of power (to and far past the point of abuse) seems really obvious, without social connection and solidarity it is much harder to defend rights. Is this social connection available today? In public spaces, the difference between ghetto-ising and allowing spaces for groups to share common concerns is important but maybe harder to understand in digital public spaces. The difference between being included in a unified public space (with questionable freedom of speech), and having a social space where you can voice your concerns safely and where they will be heard. 

<pre>scold’s bridle or gossip's bridle

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh terrifying. Also clear links with slavery where the same torture equuipment was used. Eeeugggh really horrifying.

Even when used with the older meaning it displayed new connotations

This, as before relationship of what the word symbolises and how the signified is percieved.

In many parts of the world, women have historically been seen as the weavers of memory... They are also those who hand down acquired knowledges and wisdoms—concerning medical remedies, the problems of the heart, and the understanding of human behavior

Federici seems to be idolising the link between these behaviours and women, and I feel like she is suggesting a return to these sorts of gender roles? Definitely I see the reason to re-empower women and revive the important practices (for example here knowledge sharing) that were lost, but at some point reinstating the gender divide and roles that existed in Europe before capitalism, or that exist outside of capitalism, seems like a bad plan. Just because its not capitalism doesnt mean its good. What does it mean to revive female practices that were repressed in a multigender, post-binary world, surely they need to be broken apart, scavenged, reformed.

But we are regaining our knowledge. As a woman recently put it in a meeting on the meaning of witchcraft, the magic is: “We know that we know.”

xoxo gossip girl

Wages Against Housework, Silvia Federici

But if we take wages for housework as a political perspective, we can see that struggling for it is going to produce a revolution in our lives and in our social power as women. It is also clear that if we think we do not ‘need’ that money, it is because we have accepted the particular forms of prostitution of body and mind by which we get the money to hide that need.

Money is exchanged and the people who have money have power to get what they want, does this mean that giving someone money is giving them power? In exchange for goods / services they can currently give you. So (presumably, maybe) what SiSi is about to get at is that it is important what is exchanged for money, as this determines why the receiver of the money has their power. If I am paid a wage for housework that is very different to being given pocket money by my husband.

The wage gives the impression of a fair deal: you work and you get paid, hence you and your boss are equal; while in reality the wage, rather than paying for the work you do, hides all the unpaid work that goes into profit. But the wage at least recognizes that you are a worker, and you can bargain and struggle around and against the terms and the quantity of that wage, the terms and the quantity of that work.

This argument seems stronger pre-Thatcher, and I wonder if wages for housework is a more useful idea in general in a society where labour unions have more power, the idea of a women's union. In a world where we have covid payments and trial runs of UBI schemes, maybe this doesn't feel as powerful as it might have at the time.

We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in struggle.

When Queen played "I Want to Break Free" at Rock in Rio, why were people upset? In contrast to what I was getting at a second ago, is the struggle for women's rights seen on the same plane as other power struggles today? Sometimes yes sometimes no I think, certainly it is regularly linked to broader sexual/gender rights and the rights of minorities, but to more economic-based struggles maybe still not enough.

We must admit that capital has been very successful in hiding our work.

Hidden work is an interesting idea.

In the same way as god created Eve to give pleasure to Adam, so did capital create the housewife to service the male worker physically, emotionally and sexually.

This sums it up pretty well. There is a very fine line though, and I wonder (from a privileged position of not being forced into this life) if I would like to be paid to raise my children, feed my family, have sex with my partner. I don't think bringing more of the human sphere of existence under the regulation of money lifts the woman's experience high enough, although it certainly lifts her higher. But mostly it seems to put her in the same struggle as her husband, the solidarity would have benefits and lead to future freedom but this doesn't seem like freedom in itself to me. If I pay a slave, yes they are technically no longer a slave but do they need more autonomy and freedom than that to be an equal?

In a discussion with David Wengrow Silvia mentions how societies in Labrador and Canada had to be taught to beat their children by European invaders, the ideals of tyranny and property that exist within the traditional European family structure are taught and is wages for housework a good way to break these ideals down? Maybe, this article at least shows that they should be broken down somehow. Is making a woman a waged worker giving her more or less autonomy? Feels like a trade of freedoms that is probably a positive over all but the negatives should still be taken into account. Do we all want to be workers?

To ask for wages for housework will by itself undermine the expectations society has of us, since these expectations – the essence of our socialization – are all functional to our wageless condition in the home.

Yes definitely undermines, but is it the best (or a healthy) way to undermine. I'm also not sure about the asking part. You could also undermine societies expectations by demanding diplomatic immunity, acting like you're the president, or registering yourself as a corporation. These all sound like fun things to do actually.

It should be clear, however, that when we struggle for a wage we do not struggle to enter capitalist relations, because we have never been out of them. We struggle to break capital’s plan for women, which is an essential moment of the divisions within the working class, through which capital has been able to maintain its power. Wages for housework, then, is a revolutionary demand not because by itself it destroys capital, but because it forces capital to restructure social relations in terms more favourable to us and consequently more favourable to the unity of the class. In fact, to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do it. It means precisely the opposite. To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity.

This paragraph answers a lot of the questions I had about this piece so I've copied the whole thing. I am still not sure if "it forces capital to restructure social relations in terms more favourable to us" is completely true, or if this is the best way to achieve that. "Nothing can be more effective than to show that our female virtues have a calculable money value" she says but she hasnt even mentioned any alternatives. What about the Women's Day Off in Iceland and other women's strikes. Making measurable sounds like an effective tactic, but can and should everything be made measurable?

It is one thing to organize communally the way we want to eat (by ourselves, in groups, etc.) and then ask the State to pay for it, and it is the opposite thing to ask the State to organize our meals.

Being paid for something does not equate to giving the thing to the provider of the money? Surely if the state pays for the day care, the food, the sexual reproduction, the state is still in some way controlling these things, maybe Federici is talking about taking an active or vocal role in these decisions as women and as individuals, rather than letting other individuals ("the State") decide? This is presented as if it is a choice, is it? Of course it should be, and maybe she is saying to keep this in mind when proposing struggles like this.

The things we have to prove are our capacity to expose what we are already doing, what capital is doing to us and our power in the struggle against it.

Theorizing the Uncomputable, Alexander Galloway

watch it

Further reading:

Ada Dietz: Algebraic Expressions in Handwoven Textiles, 1949

Guy Debord: A Game of War (Le Jeu de la Guerre, 1987)

Asger Jorn, Three sided football

Alexander Galloway: Gaming, Essays on Algorithmic Culture

A Narrative Theory of Games, Espen Aarseth

read here

“Interactive Fiction” by Anthony Niesz and Norman Holland, 1984

McKenzie Wark says (talking about capitalism) that if the word feels like it doesn't fit anymore then it's probably wrong. But putting the word 'narrative' beside 'games' for me gives two results: 'narrative games' and 'game narratives' (of course there are other variations with plurals and singulars, but I'll focus on these two for now).

The first, 'narrative games', is very clearly a category of computer games to me. Breath of the Wild is a narrative game, Worms is not. Things can be on the margin of the category (Is Pacman a narrative game? It has characters and a plot), and the category can be stretched and skewed to prove a point (all games are narrative games is really just word play) but in most cases it makes sense and is seful to say that some games contain narrative elements ('theoretical concepts such as “story”, “fiction”, “character,” “narration” or “rhetoric”') and those games can be referred to as 'narrative games'.

The second combination of the two words is 'game narratives' which again seems to refer to something internal to the game to me, for the moment ignoring more extended narratives of the game world like the story of Half-Life 3 or the Super Mario Bros Movie. Game narratives are the stories (fictions, characters, etc.) within a game. Narrative is an element or group of elements that are within games and can be used to examine certain aspects of them. What narratives are in Fortnite, where is the narrative in Minesweeper. As a characteristic, narrative is a way to look at games.

there is much to gain from a rigorous application of narratology to game studies

But also maybe the interesting thing about computer games is what is left in them after you describe the narrative elements, after you describe the ludic elements. Is there something unique to this medium? The feeling of exploring an open map, being able to fly, being able to skate, there is something about the immersion of a computer game that I don't think you get from other media. Not just immersion but powering-up, in music you can only tell me "Heaven is a Halfpipe" but in a computer game right now on earth I can do jack. There's no way I can know Ash Ketchum's struggle as much through the TV show or the card game as I can through playing his life on the GameBoy (although maybe the cards are not as well executed as the games or the show, but even if they were).

to emphasize the crucial importance of combining the mechanical and the semiotic aspects and to caution against and criticize the uncritical and unqualified application of terms such as “narrative” and “story” to games.

This does not feel like appropriate language to talk about games. I think Aarboy is trying to say something like "it's important to pay attention to the play part of gameplay as well as the stories in the game, because being a player makes you relate to the medium differently than a reader or viewer".

I wish to challenge the recurrent practice of applying the theories of literary criticism to a new empirical field, seemingly without any critical reassessment of the terms and concepts involved. (Aarseth 1997: 14)

The author of this essay has just quoted themself in the third person. Some readers may find this unusual (eg Stephen).

games and stories seem to share a number of elements, namely a world, its agents, objects and events.

Yessss and also (especially in the case of games, but this is useful for other stories) a range of possible actions in the world which are selected not just ideologically but for narrative purposes. Eg. why didnt the eagles fly to Mordor, and other "plotholes" which are choices not available in the narrative, actions you can't take in the game or areas you cant reach.

Whatever the answer, it seems clear that it is not purely a game, but a piece of software that does contain, among other things, a game.

Has anyone done a Clifford Geertz style analysis of games? A thick description, what are the players thinking, what are the game developers thinking, and also who else is involved in the game (the labourers who create and package it, the audience, are there NPC's ouside of the game?).

Ontic

Relating to entities and the facts about them; relating to real as opposed to phenomenal existence.

Multicursal

Of a maze or labyrinth: having more than one possible route between the centre and the outside.

My present approach is to see the ludo-narrative designspace as four independent, ontic dimensions: WORLD, OBJECTS, AGENTS, and EVENTS. Every game (and every story) contains these four elements, but they configure them differently

Yeah cool.

If an(y) interesting experience in a game is an “emergent narrative,” where does it end? And why limit this category to game-based situations? At some point it becomes hard to distinguish narratives from any other type of worldly experience

Well for me it probably ends where a narrative is something created (intentionally or otherwise) and this created story contains elements of the worldview of the creator(s) which it often (again intentionally or not) communicates to the narratee. This is probably not all worldly experience, relax, unless we are living in a simulation.

The story-telling model shown in section four really shows me how much of a traditional narrative model Espy is abandoning. All of his "ontic dimensions" fit into the category of Existents, except for Events, which is right beside them. These all fit in the "story" side of the "story-telling" model which leaves out all of the discourse elements, how the story is told. Hopefully he'll address these anyway.

A kernel is what makes us recognize the story... Satellites are what can be replaced or removed
while still keeping the story recognizable, but which defines the discourse; replace the satellites and the discourse is changed.

Kernels/satellites is a nice idea, but Im not sure what EA means by discourse here. In the diagram he implied discourse is the unimportant half, and now he is relegating it to something that does not happen in the kernel of the story. It feels like he is saying there is some essential information in the main plot line that is the "point" of the story, which doesn't seem correct to me.

However, the world presented in a game is not necessarily a game world only. A game can contain two types of space, the ludic and the extra-ludic.

The difference between the playable, explorable 'gameworld' and the (usually larger) fictional world the game is set in.

In a previous paper (Aarseth 2005) I

This is the third time he has quoted himself, baller.

[Objects] are important because they determine the degree of player agency in the game: a game which allows great player freedom in creating or modifying objects will at the same time not be able to afford strong narrative control.

Probably true in most cases but this feels more like a correlation to me than the only cause. A player has agency based on the actions they can take more generally, what other agents can they interact with and how those interactions can play out, how can they explore the world in terms of speed and percieved freedom of movement, do events feel like they are happening to or caused by the player.

It can be claimed that the richness of character is an important authorial tool that characterizes the positive potential of authorship in games, where malleability and user control limit authorial affordances.

This does not fit with for example the characters of Sims, who can become extremely complex mostly due to the player, rather than the "author", assuming EA Games is referring to the game designer here. Unless he's talking about authorship in a more general sense of users creating meaning in which case I totally agree. Anyway yeah Sims, computer game as a toolset or dollhouse for exploring relationships according to the player's will rather than a novel with some exemplar relationships.

In the events section he presents story and game as opposite ends of a spectrum which seems completely unrelated to the rest of the essay. Also the diagram is titled discourse/infuence, in reference to the players influence over the kernel and sattelite narratives, this makes me even more confused about what he means by discourse.

Narrative theory of games model Espen Aarseth

The model in section 9 has lots of useful words/categories in it, but the "narrative pole - ludic pole" axis in it is really not helpful. Luckily Microsoft Paint has a really useful tool for remixing ludonarrative diagrams so I have amended it. He then draws lines through the diagram representing different games, for example Minecraft apparently goes across the bottom of the graph as a "pure game". This really doesn't seem to match up with the more flexible theory presented earlier. In the 'objects' category this gives Minecraft only Inventable objects, while it in fact has all the types listed here, and the graph ignores how different types of object interact. I think he has done a good job of mapping the game space in this diagram but a bad job of charting how individual games move through this space like a discrete linear function, real games are much more interesting and messy than this. I dont think any of the conclusions in this section really follow from really good exploration of what a game is in previous sections.

Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory, Raymond Williams

What if the means of production is a superstructural idea and not materialist at all? By letting the people believe they are in control by allowing them access to the means of production, can they still be controlled? Eg through force (or the threat of force), access to society, etc.

Is there a relationship between Calvinist predetermination and Marx's use of the word "determine"? Re Calvinists and the time of the witch trials.

There is, on the one hand, from its theological inheritance, the notion of an external cause which totally predicts or prefigures, indeed totally controls a subsequent activity. But there is also, from the experience of social practice, a notion of determination as setting limits, exerting pressures.

Should have just read one sentence further, this is what I was talking about. I think Ray is saying Marx had a more fluid version of "determine" in mind, one with more feedback and flexibility, as opposed to the set-it-and-forget-it universe the god of the calvinists created. What rituals did the Calvinists have that reinforced this idea of predetermination? Are there rituals that work counter to this? For example fortune telling and looking into the future very much depends on whether you believe the future has already been decided. I'm pretty sure physics allows for an undecidable and unpredictable future, which feels like a more empowering future for individuals whose path seems socially determined (in a bad or controlled way). Maybe some undecidable elements of physics could be incorporated into a freeing ritual. What about chaotic systems in mathematics, and chaos in general as a (often outsider) religious idea? I read the phrase "chaos as oracle" somewhere recently, I think it was in Musimathics chapter 9 have to double check. No it was "Chance as Oracle". Re: chance as cosmic will, John Cage, the I Ching, Jung's synchronicity. Chance in art as allowing the voice of nature to enter instead of emphasising the voice of people. This description, maybe makes chance sound antisocialist? It depends if you are taking the voice of "the people" away or the voice of specific people who are in charge I guess.

the notion of ‘homologous structures’, where there may be no direct or easily apparent similarity, and certainly nothing like reflection or reproduction, between the superstructural process and the reality of the base, but in which there is an essential homology or correspondence of structures, which can be discovered by analysis.

What theory is this in reference to? Or what specific examples? When I search this term I just get references to this essay.

while a particular stage of the development of production can be discovered and made precise by analysis, it is never in practice either uniform or static.

Production is always changing, and ideology is always following it with some lag? Or ideology is attempting to staticify production? If the ideology were really behind (by any significant amount) wouldn't it be more obviously inappropriate and useless? The uselessness of ideas only seems to boil over at certain points in history, 1848, 1989, etc.

we have to revalue ‘the base’ away from the notion of a fixed economic or technological abstraction, and towards the specific activities of men in real social and economic relationships, containing fundamental contradictions and variations and therefore always in a state of dynamic process.

This sounds like a good definition to me. "Social and economic relationships" implies production not just of physical goods but, as he says after, "the primary production of society itself, and of men themselves, material production and reproduction of real life". Productive social forces beyond the economy.

If we come to say that society is composed of a large number of social practices which form a concrete social whole, and if we give to each practice a certain specific recognition, adding only that they interact, relate and combine in very complicated ways, we are at one level much more obviously talking about reality, but we are at another level withdrawing from the claim that there is any process of determination...

Why? Yes it is a more complicated picture and therefore making generalisations and predictions is harder, but maybe the reality is complex and chaotic, and predictions should be hard to make? The difference seems to me to be in the words "determination" and "interact", thinking of other complex systems like the weather this seems like a much more appropriate term. The scale of phenomena needs to be taken into account to understand the degree they can be understood, and maybe society is not a machine with two cogs, one driving the other. It is maybe deceptively messy like a double pendulum. I dont think its even that deceptive though, it seems obviously complex to me.

...And this I, for one, would be very unwilling to do.

Why, you too chicken?

[Hegemony] is a whole body of practices and expectations; our assignments of energy, our ordinary understanding of the nature of man and of his world. It is a set of meanings and values which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society.

the selectivity [of tradition and history] is the point; the way in which from a whole possible area of past and present, certain meanings and practices are chosen for emphasis, certain other meanings and practices are neglected and excluded.

Framing and reframing of certain evidence and past practices which furthers the aims of today's hegemony. The celebration (and rejection) of the past is how we define the present and our aspirations for the future.

We have to recognize the alternative meanings and values, the alternative opinions and attitudes, even some alternative senses of the world, which can be accommodated and tolerated within a particular effective and dominant culture.

Hegemony is not a single idea owned by a single class, but the full range of ideologies believed and promoted by all the various agents in society. Does this include non human agents such as corporations, classes or political parties? Is it more useful to think of the ideas of these actors or to focus on a single scale (that of individual humans for example, or the scale of classes), mixing the scales seems useful to me.

Ray suggests the real internal oppositions of things like parliamentary politics 'do not in practice go beyond the limits of the central effective and dominant definitions'. But surely in his previous hegemony-as-multiplicity ideas there would be a more realistic interpretation of the limits of dominant definitions being something more elastic and changing (usually slowly I suppose). In that case I would guess oppositions within society (such as politics) are potential active drivers of these changes in limits, although maybe he is suggesting these oppositions have no real change which certainly seems possible too. If at least the individuals involved in these oppositions didnt desire change to happen (and believe it possible), surely they wouldn't bother with the opposition at all?

Residual and Emergent Cultures

okie, makes sense. Residual exapmples he gives are religious and rural practices and ideas today. The residual culture has to be incorporated into the dominant culture for the latter to make sense. Emergent culture has to be incorporated by the dominant culture too because they are also part of 'effective contemporary practice'. This all makes sense but has a bit of an arrow of time feeling to it that seems wrong, surely cultures can regress and fluctuate between ideas, rather than the new idea always being better? Or even if the new idea is better, it still doesn't mean there will be linear progress.

I am sure it is true of the society that has come into existence since the last war, that progressively, because of developments in the social character of labour, in the social character of communications, and in the social character of decision, it extends much further than ever before in capitalist society into certain hitherto resigned areas of experience and practice and meaning.

Society is more hegemonic than it used to be, seems like a difficult claim to argue but I'm sure historians and anthropologists would have an opinion. But the metrics are so different in a world with NATO, the UN and Big Tech, did these kinds of organisations have analogues in the past? The church, the family, the state seem to have been more powerful? The complexity I think makes it really hard to make big statements like he is doing. This was written in the 70s though maybe it was different then.

In capitalist practice, if the thing is not making a profit, or if it is not being widely circulated, then it can for some time be overlooked.

Can secret subversive ideas spread without detection through disorganisation? For example by appearing multiple, small scale and in conflict with each other, various branches could go unnoticed while actually being part of a bigger whole. Also if things are less obviously oppositional, are they less likely to be quashed or incorporated by the dominant culture. Is this something that would have to happen intentionally, or is it also possible for various supposedly unrelated actors to suddenly discover their shared aims?

It was very evident in the sixties, in some of the emergent arts of performance, that the dominant culture reached out to transform them or seek to transform them. In this process, of course, the dominant culture itself changes, not in its central formation, but in many of its articulated features. 

Why does he claim the dominant culture doesn't change in its central formation again? This doesnt make sense to me.

There is no Fifth Symphony, there is no work in the whole area of music and dance and performance, which is an object in any way comparable to those works in the visual arts which have survived.

Unless the definition of 'object' is expanded to include these, which would be helpful for understanding the 'objects' or works of visual arts too. These are not items which arrived to us as if from a time machine from the past and directly from their creator. They are works that are reinterpretted every time they are performed, in a range of active and receptive ways by different participants, just like the musicians and audience of a musical performance. As Christopher Small says in Musicking, 'all art is performance'. Oh this is sort of what he says in the next paragraph never mind, under the name 'notations'.

The relationship between the making of a work of art and the reception of a work of art, is always active, and subject to conventions, which in themselves are forms of social organization and relationship, and this is radically different from the production and consumption of an object.

Again I think he is minimising the word 'object' a bit, but I agree with the general point. There are also complex relationships in the making of other 'objects' like tins of food, scientific theories, smartphones, political ideas, humans: art doesn't seem exceptional here to me.

What this can show us here about the practice of analysis is that we have to break from the notion of isolating the object and then discovering its components. On the contrary we have to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions.

This makes sense as a conclusion! Good job! Although it seems useful in a lot of situations to examine a practice through the residue of artifacts it leaves behind, so understanding objects has to play a part here somewhere.

I am saying that we should look not for the components of a product but for the conditions of a practice.

Sounds like a good idea. 'A practice' sounds a bit individualistic though, presumably we could also have the practice of punk musicians in 1970s and the practice of schoolboys in Belfast as well as the practice of Stiff Little Fingers.

The irreducibly individual projects that particular works are.

How can you say this after writing all the rest of this essay? Are you implying there is only a practice when objects are taken in relation to each other, and one single object is on its own unique or isolated? I dont think I agree.

what we are actively seeking is the true practice which has been alienated to an object

Sounds like there is a 'correct reading', is this true. A 'true' practice sounds unlikely, maybe a true history would be more useful, but even then that doesn't fully define what something is/means now or what it can do in future. No truth for me thanks anyway.

Six (Difficult and Inconvenient) Values to Reclaim the Future with Old Media, Lori Emerson

I agree with a lot of this but I thought it would be nice to locate the points of tension for me, and try to offer alternative values to address these points.

Slow

Inefficiency and slowness as a way to escape planned obsolescence and "the relentless push toward productivity, consumption, and waste". I like this idea but I wonder if it can ever fall into the category of direct action, as opposed to protest? Is inefficiency a real strategy for an alternative way of living? Slowness absolutely, maybe its just the term inefficient that sits funny with me. Inefficient I assume means complex, having unexpected outputs, accepting unexpected inputs, flexible, adaptive, non goal-oriented, organic. This idea to me is not the opposite of "efficient" but something else, just as slow is not the opposite of fast. Opportunity for more positive definitions again, I will rename this one

Zen

ˢᵐᵃˡˡ

I like small too, but it sometimes sounds like separate to me. Maybe scalable isn't such a bad word, but not the way it is usually meant. Elastic, stretchy, squishy. Systems (networks, machines, ideas) that can adapt to and serve the people, situations and things that compose them. There's always room for one more at the table. It's ok if you need to go. Maybe this one could be called

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs

Open

"The vast majority of us will never understand how the internet works at the levels of software, hardware, and infrastructure". That's ok. Most of us will never understand dentistry, or group theory, or how to sing baqashot. Some of these things are inaccessible without training and some of these things can only be understood or advanced by larger groups instead of individuals. And some people don't want to hack their roomba, that's also ok. However I do agree with the general point so only a slight change into

Openable

Censorship and accessibility are also in this category which is a related but additional issue, also to do with control. The issue of freedom of speech is a whole can of worms that I dont have time for right now. So I'll just add in a point

Accessible

Cooperative

Cooperative is put here as an opposite to corporate, I dont think this is the first time this has come up? A corporation (according to the other wiki) is "an organization—usually a group of people or a company—authorized by the state to act as a single entity ... and recognized as such in law for certain purposes". This sounds pretty cooperative to me. And as much as we like to say corporate interests don't align with public interests, they are devices created by humans so must at least align with at least one human's interests in some way. Maybe the real issue with corporations is the idea of "limited liability". That is (again from the big wiki) that "a passive shareholder in a corporation will not be personally liable either for contractually agreed obligations of the corporation, or for torts (involuntary harms) committed by the corporation against a third party". Now this is a dangerous idea, and has led to many sad, painful, hurtful decisions being made. In fact it is straight up irresponsible. So why dont we rename this one

Accountable

If you mess up, take responsibility, tell people, we will talk through it and fix it together.

This also avoids the impractical idea that we all want to be involved in running social media platforms, or that the people who run them should be the only ones who can benefit from them. Specialisation is ok, we can still be a team.

Care

I like this term (for a general approach to life) but again am cautious of the way it is posed as an antithesis to "innovate" in the context of machines/networks. Innovate means "make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products". Which is pretty good, and even similar to the definition of care provided here. Why maintain when you can improve? Improving does not have to imply, as it currently does, throwaway consumerism, forced obsolescence, bad craftsmanship or blackboxing. For example why dont we improve on these elements themselves? This thing of "they dont make em like they used to" is bollocks, they didnt make iPhones in the 70s, thats why no one has one. Commodore 64s were still made of plastic in big factories with environmentally harmful shipping strategies. If you're drooling its probably fetishisation. But more important than any of this, I don't care about the machine. I care about the people who made it, the people who use it, the people who transport it, and maybe after that the environment and the planet it was made on, sorry for sounding anthropocentric but humans are the significant actors in this production. So just to be contentious I would like to call this one

Innovative

Failure

I'm not sure if I see anything wrong with this one. But it does make me think, when failure happens what should you do? Try again? Give up? Either can be logical steps after accepting the failure in some way, accepting in the former as in acknowledging, learning, and trying again; or accepting in the latter as in understanding, learning, and adapting goals and ways of being. Maybe this just depends on the situation. In this situation I hoped to rewrite the name of each value:

Failure

The Matrix, N.H. Pritchard; and Charles Olson Reading at Berkeley

I made a mistake re-read here

Technology & Ethos, Imamu Amiri Baraka

it has been written

If I invented a word placing machine, an “expression-scriber,” if  you  will, then I would have a kind of instrument into which I could step & sit or sprawl or hang & use not only my fingers to make words express feelings but elbows, feet, head, behind, and all the sounds I wanted, screams, grunts, taps, itches

Yes for sure but also the body writes, the body reads, another approach is to reveal the technology that is already there as something real in the world, that can really be touched. It is touched through a narrow predefined route but this route can be carved out (maybe easier than creating a completely new route).

we must be “free from the oppressor’s spirit,” as well.

This is a good goal but he keeps defining us in opposition to Western, so it sounds like it is still a few steps away. For now (forever?) we have to navigate the world as it exists to be able to create the world as it should be.

See everything fresh and “without form”–then make forms that will express us truthfully and totally and by this certainly free us eventually.

I agree, but this can be painful and insensitive to people, is it right to see a bomb as a potential firework? Is it good to look for constructive power or beauty in evil or danger? What can we make out of NFTs? What can we make out of corporate space races? If we keep putting flowers in guns what will happen?

The technology itself must represent human striving. It must represent at each point the temporary perfection of the evolutional man. And be obsolete only because nothing is ever perfect, the only constant is change

This has always been our goal, we will keep making mistakes, we will keep improving? This sounds really optimistic and reckless I dunno.

The "Moralities" of Poaching. Manufacturing personal artefacts on the factory floor, Anteby, M.

'serious leisure'

How is it leisure if it is during work hours, and creating something you need?

The activity also creates new social ties and obligations [as does gift-giving more generally]

The cost or exchange system of gifts is something to explore more. Rejecting commerce doesn't mean there is no longer a system through which goods and services flow, and that alternative system is often less obvious. Read Graeber.

because supervisors are involved, and uses these points to suggest that poaching is not just about worker resistance

Do people still believe that managers aren't workers?

This morality is never properly defined, but is enforced by the community of poachers.

This can be a positive, a system based not on rules but continuous assessment by the community on a case by case basis. More about juries than laws, the people at the time have more power than the tradition. Although laws, maxims or even documented precedent can be useful for people attempting to navigate the system, to understand what is allowed and expected.

further reading

Notes on: De Certeau, M.(1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, Dave Harris

the words are here

'ordinary man' [usual apologies for the gendered terminology], who existed before texts and any attempt to represent him or his activities, especially in the form of numbers. Everyday practices are to be foregrounded and articulated. This is not an analysis of individuals, since social relations are always involved: indeed, the 'individual' is but a plurality of these relations.

how individual sentences are constructed on the basis of shared vocabulary and syntax

Systems/networks exist to be used just like all other technology. But they also restrict and confine, just like all other technology.

which networks and resources help people resist and evade the discipline offered by institutions?

Can the same networks not afford resistance and evasion, the institutions are emergent properties of the network rather than controllers of the other actors in it? The people navigate the network and so do the institutions, although with different amounts of power and influence.

erratic 'trajectories', 'unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths'. These cannot be described by formal analysis, including statistics. They feature bricolage and discursivenss, and lack the homogeneity required by analysis.

Again this applies to non-human actors in the network too, including the institutions it is implied these tactics are used against. Oh the whole next paragraph disagrees with what I am saying, lovely. Strategies are tactics, they are the same.

Reading, for example, looks passive, but it is an activity, a 'silent production', involving improvisation, the use of memory to connect elements from other texts, or activities such as skipping. The world of the author is really only 'rented' by readers (xxi). Reading is as mobile as conversation.

Is conversation mobile? Does consciousness emerge only through dialogue? Can you know something without talking about it, or reading about it? Can you know something by cooking it for someone else? Can you know something through dance? By her clothes? By his smell? By looking at each other? Is there ever a time when another human isn't involved?

Science also offers combinations of formal discourses and 'ancient tricks', masquerading as methods -- these are tactical too.

Fuck you, science.

The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil

there is always a network of writings, and influences are not easily accessed

And these influences aren't always the same ones the reader notices, like did the author want me to think of Earle Brown now? And David Arden? And the cast of Brooklyn 99? Where does discourse stop and the real world of everything that is happening begin? Zora sent me a link to a Stormzy song. Irmak said something in Turkish. The discourse, if it is part of everyday life, is part of a network.

Reading Guide to: Bourdieu, P (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. by Dave Harris

In sociology, habitus (/ˈhæbɪtəs/) is the way that people perceive and respond to the social world they inhabit, by way of their personal habits, skills, and disposition of character.

Van wikipedia.

Bourdieu manages to deny both sociological determinism and the idea of a calculating subject, so he has to revert to mechanisms in the sociology of education to explain how structures actually work -- through knowledge acquisition, the interiorisation of structures, and then the exteriorisation of the results of learning in the habitus. 

How is this not sociological determinism? I dont get teh difference between structure and habitus.

Tactics proliferate and resist classification. They are singular and unconscious. 

I dunno. Just because it's complex doesn't mean its unknowable. Just because it's vague doesnt mean it hasnt happened before. Also there is a practical reason to acknowledge tactics as classifiable, to allow unified resistance.

Marx never visited a factory

Ha! Wanker. Is this true? Dr. Evert Gummesson and Paul Johnson are the people who claim this, but a quick search online gives mixed opinions about it. Engels was a capitalist, in the textile industry. Did Hegel ever have an actual conversation with anyone? Definitely the overall point that philosophers and theorists are toolbags seems true.

The key technique to manage and domesticate is narrative, which once led to the dominance of literary knowledge as the key to understanding.

How to escape this though? Even that question is just part of a narrative?

 aesthetics has slowly become isolated and codified, and the discipline gradually becomes a matter of relating theory to practice... the last stage is to try and develop a theory of practice

Isn't all theory "of practice"? Theories only exist to attempt to explain the world? Sometimes this feels uselessly looped up to me.

Narrations therefore are never just descriptive, but involve the creation of 'fictional space', which helps people escape from, and 'balance with' the present.

Of course, nothing should be "taken literally", the map is not the territory. A narrative can attempt to be descriptive, but it is only creating a fictional space. Sometimes this space's relationship with (a percieved) reality can make it useful to the writer/reader. And how does this apply to less obviously discursive practices? A cookbook is full of errors. Maybe the glance was just a glance.

Reading Guide to: Lyotard, J - F (1986) The Post - Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

memory can alter space, and destabilize equilibrium. Memory can disestablish order, since it is invisible and thus escapes power.

Can, but also it can be used for the exact opposite purposes as well of course, it can be used to maintain stable equilibrium, and to establish and sustain order. It doesnt escape power but rather is a tool of power which can counteract dominant narratives as much as support them.

story tellers can gain authority even though they have no power

No, to have someone listening to your stories is a form of power, and if they believe them the storyteller clearly has even more power.

Tactical moves of this kind display:... alteration, singularity, mobility

What are we really talking about?

The pedestrians on the streets down below read the city as a text, but, crucially they also write it.

Its a good job this sentence says "down below" or else I would almost believe it. It actually makes this whole section hard to read, the flaneur vibe feels gross. Although I also have to admit to relating to these "readings" of the city. Two days ago I was playing the game where I work out the polyrhythm of the length pf my steps to the length of the slabs in the path; 5:2 this time. A major tenth. I heard a song with the same interval and thought I would like to make something similar. Then I forgot about both things until now. Are these thoughts "natural" or even "everyday"? For me they feel like both but how do you generalise this sort of stuff. I remember talking to Steve Ryan about the steps thing and even he thought it was weird.

This sort of self centred and often unconscious process of significations can be displaced and condensed, as in dreams.

Is the point of putting this at the end a kind of defeatism, or acceptance of intangibility?

Walking is a kind of 'story', composed of 'debris... leftovers... fragments of scattered semantic places... combined with  things extra and other'

Ok all activity, all stories, on this level are the same they are messy and the mess is inescapable I can live with that (sometimes).

These interrupt the accepted framework and order, which 'leaks... meaning: it is a sieve order' 

Death of a Son, Jon Silkin

  I have seen stones: I have seen brick
But this house was made up of neither bricks nor stone
    But a house of flesh and blood
      With flesh of stone

  And bricks for blood. A house
Of stones and blood in breathing silence with the other
   Birds singing crazy on its chimneys.
     But this was silence,

A Number System Invented by Inuit Schoolchildren Will Make Its Silicon Valley Debut, Amory Tillinghast-Raby

click here to generate html

Kaktovik numerals

These are base-20 written numerals relating to the spoken Iñupiaq counting system, which have a visual link to their meaning in the number of strokes they use. The article is really about the numerals but makes me think more of base systems. The arguments for base-12 sometimes sound really strong, it definitely would be easier for arithmetic for humans.

When someone says base-20 you assume the "20" part refers to the number of combined fingers and toes most humans have, that is that it is a number in a decimal base system. Some people choose to use the word "dozenal" instead of "duodecimal" but "dozen" or "douzaine" just come from the Latin word "duodecim". The word "uncial" has been suggested as an alternative (Crosby, W.S., The Duodecimal Bulletin Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 9-X) which has other interesting relationships to latin in a typographic sense. Another Alaska reference from Crosby:

The merits of counting by dozens don't need much arguing; the facts are pretty eloquent, given opportunity and time to do their work. The person to whom I've have the least trouble in explaining the system was a lad with a grade school education with whom I worked in Alaska, cutting and forming concrete-steel reinforcing. Having wrestled with feel and inches, and with dividing lengths into halves and thirds for so long, with him the idea clicked with no exhortation or argument on my part.

The "Imperial System" is thought of as something British or American, so clearly linked to colonial powers even in it's name. This is a system where things are divided: halved, quartered, eighthed, like territories in north Africa or the midwest US where lines drawn on a paper map become real borders instead of the other way around. But the "Metric System" is something scientific, something measured, it values careful observation and rationality. So where does the "Uncial System" fit into this? It is a transdecimal system, it breaks out of the scientific tradition of decimation without submitting to division. But base-12 feels just as Anglo-Saxon to me, or American. Grover Cleveland Perry argued for base-12 in his incredibly titled Mathamerica, 1929. He has some very wacky and fun reasons that twelve rules ten drools, including:

The Constitution, the symbol of our national Unity (one-ness) was originally signed by twelve sovereign political divisions or states. Its full political power is now complete and represented by Four Dozen states. This Nation, and its mission, symbolizes the city that “lieth foursquare, which cometh down from God, out of heaven” and is “beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth.”

Really interesting to wonder if the transition to America having 50 states instead of 48 is numerologically symbolic. Should America now expand to having 64 states, a 6-bit federation. Surely 128 states us more useful, plus a parity bit gives a full 8-bit union.

When are numbers used the most commonly? When. When is it now? Sexagesimal and duodecimal systems are so familiar to all of us because they do have a (quite) universal use for time. Sexagesimal is similar mathematically because it takes the factors of 12 (2, 3, 4, 6) and includes the obvious omission 5. How can you count without five. When I count my fingers I have ten. I count on my right hand from right to left and then on my left hand from left to right. In fact I count the thumb in the center, then flip it to the outside to count the fingers back in. And I end up in the middle with ten, whether I like it or not.

Modifying the Universal, Roel Roscam Abbing, Peggy Pierrot, Femke Snelting

request pdf transmission from breadcube

O

Our bodies are a big part of the way we communicate.

Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet, Chapter 5 about Emoji and Other Internet Gestures.

Writing is a technology that removes the body from the language.

Also McCulloch. She goes on to talk about emoji as gesture and more specifically as emblems or emblematic gestures (emblems are gestures which can stand on their own without speech and convey verbal meaning). Non-verbal communication based on traditional gesture language: this reminds me of dance, music, etc. Are emoji a performance art?

If we think of these emoji as emblems, we know that the range for variation is tiny indeed.

Mmmm this is becoming more about the McCulloch chapter than Roel's piece. I'll switch back soon.

 In an article called “We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs,” Lauren Michele Jackson pointed out that black people are overrepresented in gifs used by nonblack people, especially those that show extreme emotion. She linked this stereotype to the exaggerated acting of minstrel shows and scholar Sianne Ngai’s term “animatedness” to describe the long-standing tendency to see black people’s actions as hyperbolic.

Also "co-speech" or illustrative gesture, emoji examples such as the emoji you would put after the words "happy birthday", it doesnt matter if its cake or celebration or dancing or champagne, it doesnt matter what order, and they are to illustrate the speech more than essentially having meaning on their own. These are the emoji you browse for instead of knowing exactly what is required in advance.

🐋

Emoji have the same rhythmic tendency as beat gestures. 

In speaking about bad character encoding:

But the names for this problem in other languages speak to the frustration: Japanese mojibake, “character transformation” (that’s the same moji as in emoji); Russian krakozyabry, “garbage characters”; German Zeichensalat, “character salad”; and Bulgarian majmunica, “monkey’s (alphabet).” 

We give voice to the people about emojis. Emojination wants to make emoji approval an inclusive, representative process. Our efforts have drawn worldwide media attention through out successful campaigns for the hijab emoji and the dumpling emoji. We also run the highly successful Emojicon conference and fun Emoji Spelling Bee.

The aim of Unicode is to standardise and universalise, this is why the Unicode standard is always added to and never removed from. But is this how language works is it changing and evolving, or accumulating?

you can’t involuntarily give off an emoji. They’re all given out deliberately—you choose exactly which one to send, and you know that everyone else does, too. Emoji and all of their relatives are fake by definition.

We take the expression of mental states so much for granted in informal speech, that oldest and first-learned form of language, that it takes the dramatic expansion of a new genre, informal writing, to make us pay attention to it again.

Ok ok back to Roel.

the politics of anti-racism and anti-sexism are being emptied out of their sense and meaning for the sake of a commodified version of equality

):

the problem of universality begins with the assumption that anything can and should be encoded in symbolic logic

To what extent can these ideas be torn down from within, like Kurt Gödel tried to do? To stick with the maths, just as a metaphor, Gödel proved that consistency implies incompleteness. Does this mean that to be more complete we need to be more inconsistent? Which is more important, seeing as you do have to make a choice? Being incomplete means excluding, which being inconsistent maybe means accepting mistakes, paradoxes, contradictions and other fun things like that.

the [Unicode] standard is non-binding and the actualisation of its universality depends on the willingness of soft- and hardware manufacturers to implement the recommendations of the Consortium.

But these soft- and hardware manufacturers are in practice the members of the Unicode Consortium, so.

By carelessly merging the two lightest skin tones, Type 1 and 2, into one single modifier, the Consortium underlined that light skin functions outside this colonial gaze.

😬

Why are the Simpsons yellow? - Peter, 9, Cambridge

They're yellow because when it was time to pick the colour for the cartoon I didn't want the conventional cartoon colours.

An animator came up with the Simpsons' yellow and as soon as she showed it to me I said: 'This is the answer!' because when you're flicking through channels with your remote control, and a flash of yellow goes by, you'll know you're watching The Simpsons.

From a 2007 question from a nine year old asked of Matt Groening on CBBC Newsround.

The users’ demand for the diversification of emoji points to the way in which on-line representations might operate on the actual through the virtual, and opens up possibilities of representation that are not available in the physical world.

Sometimes this kind of argument feels like there is a delineation between "actual" and "virtual" identity, is there a place where given identity stops and chosen identity begins IRL and online? Is this place imposed culturally, is it the same or different for different people? This is implying on-line identity gives more agency to people over their identity, which I think is true in a lot of situations but a quite specific lens to view something very complex. In the spirit of being inconsistent I think this could be an appropriate place for contradictory narratives.

The characters in Unicode that are tagged “emoji” are in fact a hybrid collection of images, each with their own visual language and culture of use.

In the context of the gesture things above, the same gesture can mean different things (or be meaningless) in different cultural contexts.

Down the slippery slope, emoji have become a pre-coded form of identification.

Isn't this true of all communication in some sense? I use a vocabulary that positions me as a university student, furthermore I can switch to professional shitetalk to locate myself otherwise. There are layers of language which are used to communicate identity.

A widely published research article into the cross-platform use of emoji claimed that different renderings of the characters could lead to misunderstandings.

Completeness and consistency again, should we maybe instead accept the misunderstandings? Maybe also relates to Gretchen's idea that emoji are fake (chosen, constructed) by definition. There is a message being sent, and that means there is a possibility for it to be interpreted differently to how the sender imagined.

Should these complex questions be in the hands of the Unicode Consortium, specialised in finding technical solutions for implementing “all the living languages possible”?

Maybe? Is it making the Unicode Consortium acknowledge that language is more complex than a series of symbols? That their task is not simply to collect and classify all the icons and signs like some sort of linguistic Linnaeus. That these symbols are important to people and how they are categorised has an effect on them? And that technical solutions cant exist in isolation from cultural and human context?

We felt that the combination of the representational turn and market pressure produced unavoidable and unsolvable problems that the Unicode Consortium tried to respond to through the warped logic of the modifier mechanism. 

Yes saying the problem is unsolvable is genuinely really useful. Stop trying to solve all the problems.

The event also represents a typical case of do-ocracy, in which a (nominally) open and discursive process of negotiation is sidelined by presenting faits-accomplis. Do-ocracy is a mode of decision-making popular in technical circles for its speed and decisiveness. Having done the task also becomes the justification and validation for it... Do-ocracy assumes that everyone is able to “act” with the same power and when you want to oppose a decision, you just “do” something else. 

Yah bad. Hard to avoid at smaller scales as well.

Technical decisions are sometimes taken without thorough reflection on their implications, whether historical or scientific, let alone on their social consequences.

Something I think we're all aware of, but yes this is a really good example.

Yet the Unicode Consortium operates as much more than just an IT standardisation of existing languages. Through the encoding of emoji, it creates and normalises a set of representations of humanity. 

And outside of emoji, this is happening in any standardisation of language / characters.

Unicode could provide such a platform if it took its own potential more seriously and opened up the process of technology making and standard-forming to the larger public. 

Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL, Ed Post

Copyright (c) 1982 Last modified: Tue Feb 23 17:12:40 EST 1999

ABEND

An abnormal end or abend is an abnormal termination of software, or a program crash. Is a crash really abnormal? What is a normal termination?

TRASH-80

At the time of this writing, derogatory slang for the TRS-80 desktop computer. While the original "Real Men Dont Eat Quiche" is obviously satire, this one feels a bit more like it believes itself so far it's a bit weird.

Programmers don't need comments: the code is obvious.

Ok maybe it's not taking itself so seriously and I just dont get it. Or maybe its because it's 41 years old. The idea of code being obvious is actually a really good one though, and obviously part of the structured programming ideals this is claiming to tear down. Make it so less comments are needed.

As all Real Programmers know, the only useful data structure is the array. Strings, lists, structures, sets -- these are all special cases of arrays and and can be treated that way just as easily without messing up your programing language with all sorts of complications.

When is it right to open the box and look at the underlying structure? We have these symbols and categories that help us to navigate the world, and if we always remove them we wont get anything done. A computer could be controlled with an electron gun. But to blindly accept the inherited categories assumes they are good enough, and often they aren't. How do you know which ones are good enough or good-enougher than the other ones? Which black box should we open, is it just Deal or No Deal?

when it gets right down to it, Unix is a glorified video game. People don't do Serious Work on Unix systems: they send jokes around the world on USENET and write adventure games and research papers.

Maybe still true.

OS/370

The IBM System/370 (S/370) is a model range of IBM mainframe computers announced on June 30, 1970, as the successors to the System/360 family. The series mostly maintains backward compatibility with the S/360, allowing an easy migration path for customers; this, plus improved performance, were the dominant themes of the product announcement. In September 1990, the System/370 line was replaced with the System/390.

Back then, memory was memory -- it didn't go away when the power went off. Today, memory either forgets things when you don't want it to, or remembers things long after they're better forgotten

Unfortunately, no Real Programmer would ever use a computer whose operating system is called SmallTalk, and would certainly not talk to the computer with a mouse.

Maybe still a stereotype. What's wrong with a mouse. What's wrong with talking. Where do the 20th century assumptions stop and the limitations or modes of interacting with the machine begin. Is a macbook a computer? Is Google Search a useful tool?

TECO

According to Murphy [the original developer of the software], the initial acronym was Tape Editor and Corrector because "punched paper tape was the only medium for the storage of program source on our PDP-1. There was no hard disk, floppy disk, magnetic tape (magtape), or network." By the time TECO was made available for general use, the name had become "Text Editor and Corrector", since even the PDP-1 version by then supported other media. It was subsequently modified by many other people and is a direct ancestor of Emacs, which was originally implemented in TECO macros.

SUPERZAP

Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Still a thing! 41 years later. But space is enticing I guess, and the story of it for kids is so awe inspiring, it's hard not to admire it. And the strong rational thought, if I am a computer programmer I can work for NASA and send people to the moon. How can you convince a seven-year old to make a valuable contribution to society like loving the people around them and working and living together without oppression and hatred?

As you can tell, many of the world's Real Programmers work for the U.S. Government, mainly the Defense Department. This is as it should be.

How can you convince anyone of anything when the lads are also trying to convince them?

For a while, it seemed that ADA was destined to become a language that went against all the precepts of Real Programming -- a language with structure, a language with data types, strong typing, and semicolons. In short, a language designed to cripple the creativity of the typical Real Programmer. Fortunately, [ADA] has enough interesting features to make it approachable: it's incredibly complex, includes methods for messing with the operating system and rearranging memory

That's fortunate, isn't it ADA?

He is constantly amazed that his employer actually pays him to do what he would be doing for fun anyway, although he is careful not to express this opinion out loud. 

Also still a reality/story; "job satisfaction". Why is it something we look for? If your job isn't satisfying, who's fault is it, if anyone's? How can more people be more satisfied with their jobs? How can less people have jobs? How can jobs be more satisfying? Should people be satisfied?

At the beach, the Real Programmer is the one drawing flowcharts in the sand.

I love this one.

A Real Programmer goes to a disco to watch the light show.

Heeeeey lights are fun.

Taped to the wall is a line-printer Snoopy calender for the year 1969.

This was the entry point to this text by the way from here.

Real Programmers write programs, not documentation. Leave that to the maintainence people.

Breakfast and move things.

Breakfast and move people?

The Real Programmer is capable of working 30, 40, even 50 hours at a stretch, under intense pressure.

Honestly I think maybe I used to be this guy a little bit :,( Can definitely relate it is a very harmful pressure that can come to exist through internal/external influences.

In fact, he prefers it that way. 

And this took a while to get past, and still shows up sometimes.

As long as there are ill-defined goals, bizarre bugs, and unrealistic schedules, there will be Real Programmers willing to jump in and Solve The Problem, saving the documentation for later.

A Prehistory of the Cloud, Tung-Hui Hu

via subnet 10.0.0.103 on the xvm

Intimacies of the User: From the Stolen Look to Stolen Time

Stewart Brand's Dec 7, 1972 Rolling Stone article on Spacewar! Addeddate 2018-09-04 17:30:48

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California runs a demo of Spacewar every first and third Saturday.

Added to the list of nerdy tourist destinations.

personal computing would also mean some-thing that may seem odd to a contemporary reader: the illusion that a person would be  “given the full attention and resources of the computer.” 

Becoming a more common understanding, for networks rather than individual computers tghough I guess. Are computers in-dividual?

Hallucinating senses individually 
Are in any combination, rhythmically
Shifting gears, focus upon intensity
Wait, big people a talk nobody try fuck with i-man clarity
Mind starts slippin' to familiar tracks
Bending warping, interfering with the facts
Sensory language leaves us with no habit for lying
We are hostile aliens, immune from dying

Spaceape, Burial and Spaceape.

Does the computer have my full attention? Which one? This tab. The tab with the PDF. My phone. My headphones. They are speaking to me. There are people saying things in the songs. What are they trying to say? What does it say in the PDF? I am reading and writing and listening.

More than a second
When reading the newspaper
I felt the war
I felt her exposed position
I saw myself in the picture
And I

I took a cab there to hold her
I took a plane there to feel what she felt
You make me like charity
Instead of paying enough taxes

You Make Me Like Charity, The Knife.

I took a train there to hold her. What am I trying to give. What am I trying to take. What the fuck is going on.

By spending a fraction of a second on one user ’ s pro-gram, switching rapidly to other users ’ s programs, then immediately moving back to the first program, it appeared as if the computer were responding  Figure  2.1 Spacewar!  running on a PDP-1. (The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California runs a demo of  Spacewar  every first and third Saturday.)  ©  Joi Ito, reprinted under Creative Commons BY 2.0 license. TIME-SHARING AND VIRTUALIZATION 39instantly to each user ’ s commands

What I paste is different to what I copy. I couldnt read the licence, it wasnt visible to me. I didnt read the title and page number because I told myself they weren't in the flow. Everything is in the flow. The caption for the figure, it wasn't where I expected it to be in the flow. The whole order of everything is getting looped and fed back. My notebook is open it says

I've fallen in love 
with you and I 
have no idea what 
to do about it.

What the fuck is going on. ꓤƎ it says under the laptop. I cant read the 𐤵ꓳꓶꓢ part but I know its there. I know because I have read it many times. and I also wrote it.

he  user ’ s  subject  position  is  created  not  just by software, as media theorists would assert, but by the economic system that  undergirds  whatever  relation  any  of  us  have  with  technology

Double spaces. A missing T. Genesis by Justice comes on which has a † which is almost a T. I am multi-threading. I have multiple cores. The school is closing, I can hear the announcement behind Genesis. This is the end for now.

It's two days later and it's sunny and the afternoon and I feel very different. I'm at home and not in the studio. Miles Davis' version of A Case of You by Joni Mitchell is playing. I know it from the James Blake version. Are songs in-dividual? Is music divided into songs, or artists, or something else?

Computer power is now so plentiful that we’ve stopped counting, and the minimal cost of computation seems to enable a sort of personal freedom.

Is this a shared experience? Having worked as a freelancer in for example video editing and 3D graphics, the limitations of the computers I have access to often come into play. They slow me down. They dont have enough space, so I have less security (backups) than a big company would have. Broadband speed is sold like new cars, there is pressure to upgrade. There is pressure to buy a bigger package from the hosting provider, more speed, more bandwidth. Buy more storage on your gmail account. Buy a netflix account to access data-culture. Buy a spotify account to have autonomy over the algorithm.

time-sharing seemed to restructure the very boundaries between work and leisure, public and private

Restructuring of these boundaries, is maybe more generally to do with our relationship to labour compared to in the past? Work tasks have been divided so are now more integrated into our lives, also consumption has become the model for more aspects of life allowing them to be commercialised.

how did computing come to feel personal?

What computers are involved in my experience right now? The music is playing from the speaker, connected by bluetooth to my phone, streaming data from Spotify which is most likely coming from a nearby Google datacentre (Eemshaven or Middenmeer here in the Netherlands, or maybe St. Ghislain, Belgium) via a bunch of intermediary KPN and other telecommunication connections. There is a laptop that I type this draft onto, but when I press "Save changes" it will go to the wiki also via a bunch of connections. The PDF is coming from I believe a Raspberry Pi in an apartment not too far away from where I am right now in Oude Nord, also through some intermediaries. But yes it still feels personal, the interface physically and psychologically, even emotionally.

, this shift was not simply the result of technological inno-vation; time-sharing was symptomatic of a postwar economic shift toward multitasking  and  freelancing

A vast and unseen layer inside today ’ s cloud, known as virtualization software, ensures that the data jumbled within the cloud ’ s data centers and networks appear as individual streams of data 

This is in fact an act of dividing, as well as combining. It is boundary making and storytelling. It is potential gerrymandering, divide et impera.

the sewer system: centuries before computers were invented, sewers kept each household ’ s private business private even as it extended the armature of the state into individual homes.

Re Dave Harris on "T=he Practice of Everyday Life" De Certeau: subversive practices "interrupt the accepted framework and order, which 'leaks... meaning: it is a sieve order'".

 the fact that the word  “ computer ”   had  originally  designated  the  female  operator  of  a  machine, rather than the machine itself. 

In the Rotterdam Noord telephone exchange on Vlaggemanstraat, the women were replaced by machines in 1962. This street is also near me right now, and I suspect some of my data is passing through the wires in its' basement.

man and computer are two creatures living together in intimate association, or even close union.

from J. C. R. Licklider “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960).

If the quasi-illicit pleasure of cinema is peering in on a scene, as if through a keyhole, the computer user initially occupied  a  similar  position.

History of cinema to computers, are there other links? Cinema is generally placed behind or before television, also a story about personalisation, individuation and the creation of intimacy.

“ two-timing ”  aspect of time-sharing opened a variety of ways for users to furtively acquire time. 

Time sharing as extraction, time stealing, time sharing as selfish and abusive.

 By making the user equivalent to his or her usage, time-sharing yoked the user ’ s labor to the labor of the computer itself. In doing so, human – computer interaction initially functioned as a management technique, as a way to fash-ion an efficient worker capable of flexibly managing time. (It is no coinci-dence that multitasking, a concept that originally came out of time-sharing, now refers to this kind of flexible work.) 

As a worker in 2023 I manage my time my self flexibly. I can relate to this.

time-sharing was often experienced as a permissive and even freeing system, for it asked users to think of the computer ’ s time as their own time

Is this a codependent, symbiotic relationship? What are the user's needs and what are the computer's? I need self-affirmation. Does this mean I have an individual self? Is "my" computer part of my identity? Is "my" virtualisation and "my" slice of the cloud's time sharing me? What parts of the government are me, or what parts of the city? Where do I stop and the computer starts, at the keys and the screen? Or is it blurrier?

 By making each online resource freely available — computer storage, processing time, content, even software — the cloud encourages the pleasur-able and quasi-illicit feeling that we are getting away with something: that we, too, have stolen time. 

Why do we want to know where our information is stored, how our data is used? Guilt maybe? Shame? Fear, curiousity?

 Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the Net includes the activity of building web sites, modifying soft-ware packages, reading and participating in mailing lists and building virtual spaces. 

Are you essentially being exploited if someone else is profiting? If I go to a bar or a concert and part of the reason I go there is other people, does that mean the other people are being exploited? If we went to a house party instead and no one makes a (directly financial) profit, is it still exploitation? What if two of the people at the party work together at some point in their life? The causation here is not very obvious.

Asked to manage ourselves as users, we are also asked to manage our own privacy online by negotiating with private companies:  by  taking  on  liability  for  copyright  infringement  on  reposted images, by managing whom our posts can be shared with, and even by opting in to restrictions on search results for children, in what Raiford Guins terms a culture of self-imposed filtering.

Is an alternative being posed here? If intimacy is not mediated socially through economy, what does it go through? Government control?

“The Victorians Built Magnificent Drains” : Waste, Privacy, and the Cloud

Scientist Alan Kay 

Not how I would describe that person. At very least *computer* scientist.

I AM THE UNKNOWN GLITCH. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

Held over three days from July 26 – 28, 1966, the [“The Computer and Invasion of Privacy”] hearings featured law professors, sociologists, computer scientists, and New York state officials who had built a smaller version of this proposed data center.

The scientist noun after the computer adjective is really getting me today. In the context of professors, sociologists and state officials, the "scientists" are really given an air of empirical authority, they presumably have truth and logic on their side. Computers as we all know are made of logic. Computers don't make mistakes, they have errors in programs which are the result of bad human authors. Computer authors. Computer programmers. Computers. Computer linguists. Computer users. Computer slobs. Computer bowsies.

the telephone line and the plumbing system. These analogies offer a way to understand veiled cultural attitudes toward computing

Computer rats. Computer garbage. Computer callers. Computer listeners. Computer buggers. Computer bugs. Computer cockroaches.

Eavesdropping  on  party  lines  did  not  used  to  be  considered  an invasion of privacy, historian Ronald Kline tells us; indeed, eavesdropping was a widely accepted practice in rural communities that often formed that community ’ s  “ social network. ”

Public/private limits of conversations on social media is so often unclear or different to other conversations. Conversations between two people in a public space, which is recorded and can be publicly or semi-publicly viewed at a later time.

  It was for economic reasons — eavesdropping drained the batteries in their equipment — that telephone companies devel-oped  public  awareness  campaigns  to  teach  their  users  not  to  eavesdrop. These campaigns described the social strife that resulted from eavesdrop-ping  and  shamed  the  men  who  listened  nevertheless  by  likening  them  to thieves — or gossiping women. 

Oh no, not gossiping. Computer gossips. Computer bitches. Computer witches.

 Surely, the State is the Sewer

$ ps

Process Status. The proc file system acts as an interface to internal data structures in the kernel. It can be used to obtain information about the system and to change certain kernel parameters at runtime (sysctl).

ideally, one would program without noticing the garbage that one produced or the resources one used.

Again does this metaphor sound particularly uncomfortable because of our current environmental sensibilities in 2023? Is using memory on a laptop the same as single-use plastics? Does the metaphor really work? A rough estimate of one laptop using 146 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year for 8hrs daily use, and an average onshore wind turbine with a capacity of 2.5–3 MW can produce more than 6 million kWh in a year means the rate is about 41,000 laptops per wind turbine. How much energy does all the rest of the network use? More than the bit at the end, or less? I leave my router on 24/7, maybe its about 7.3 kilowatt-hours of electricity in a month, and 87.6 kilowatt-hours in a year. which adds another 10% already to the energy cost (considering the modem is used for six devices) just by remembering one other node in the system. It is hard to approach this problem without starting at the user, that's the way I've been taught to think about it.

Role of ARPA/DARPA in vaccinations recently, did they also have a role in this story of computer viruses at the time maybe?

As is true of the plumbing beneath the city streets, it takes an effort of will to bring software to conscious attention

From Martin Campbell-Kelly, "From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog", vii.

Waste, after all, is the residuum of consumption and productivity, the inevitable by-product of the circulatory networks valued by capitalism.

if you are logged in as one user, the word  “ nature ”  might return results related to fishing and hunting, while a second user might receive results related to environmental justice.

My results for "nature" on Google Search:

https://www.nature.com/ (along with four specific pages on this site, a description of the Journal, and three recent articles).

Related questions: What is the concept of Nature? What does Nature include? What is the impact factor of Nature? Who is Davide Castelvecchi?

Images for nature (with some tags): beautiful, wallpaper, photography, landscape, flower

https://www.nature.org/en-us/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_(journal)

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Nature

https://twitter.com/Nature

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/nature

Cloud Cartography

Both waste and vast-ness derive from the Latin  vastus  — desolate, but also empty, expansive.

Merely obtaining more knowledge about digital cul-ture ’ s materiality may not address the root problem. 

Is it possible to see the root problem without this step though? It seems to clarify it a little at least, or frame it.

 “The network intervenes in this calculation as a productive machine and as a pre-dictive/preemptive mode of simulation, ”   88   simultaneously helping to predict social connections (offering other users you might enjoy meeting) and also helping  to  produce  and  even  police  these  connections. 

It sounds like the network itself is being seen as an actor in this sentence? Is it maybe more the maps (or graphs) of the network that is active, and those maps and graphs have been created by other actors within, above or beside the network.

 the cultural fantasy of  “ mutually distrustful users, ”  who are always isolated first as atomistic nodes before they can be recon-nected  through  social  media  or  network  graphs. 

Rob Horning incisively comments: this is  “ how Facebook addresses its users, a bunch of isolated nodes connected by its graces and its software, all competing for one another ’ s attention and approval, urged perpetually to  up  the  stakes  of  their  sharing  by  Facebook ’ s  algorithms,  which  deter-mine whether their content will surface widely and reap the sought-after recognition. ”   

Inside a data center, data are connected only paratactically to each other, porn next to military documents next to banking records next to your e-mail. In that model of physical proximity, we might see an alternate map of community.

Steganography of VoIP streams, Wojciech Mazurczyk, Krzysztof Szczypiorski

128.84.21.199

US Department of Defence specifies that any covert channel with bandwidth higher than 100 bps must be considered insecure for average security requirements. Moreover for high security requirements it should not exceed 1 bps

Covert is essentially insecure, at a certain scale? Security has to be sacrificed for covertness.

VoIP is a real-time service that enables voice conversations through IP networks. It is
possible to offer IP telephony due to four main groups of protocols:
a. Signalling protocols that allow to create, modify, and terminate connections between the calling parties – currently the most popular are SIP [6], H.323 [7], and
H.248/Megaco [8],
b. Transport protocols – the most important one is RTP [5], which provides end-toend network transport functions suitable for applications transmitting real-time audio. RTP is used in conjunction with UDP (or rarely TCP) for transport of digital
voice stream,
c. Speech codecs e.g. G.711, G.729, G.723.1 that allow to compress/decompress
digitalized human voice and prepare it for transmitting in IP networks.
d. Other supplementary protocols like RTCP [5], SDP [9], or RSVP etc. that complete VoIP functionality. For purposes of this paper we explain the role of RTCP
protocol. RTCP is a control protocol for RTP and it is designed to monitor the
Quality of Service parameters and to convey information about the participants in
an on-going session. 

from https://arxiv.org/vc/arxiv/papers/0805/0805.2938v1.pdf

Before you can have a conversation (RTP) you need the signalling phase (SIP). There is a difference between a caller and a callee. The caller needs something from the conversation and is in the driving seat. The callee is subjected to the conversation, are they able to leave? ("I don't know, you called me!"). Is communication ever equal? Are there protocols that can make it more equal? ("I will be at this IP address at this time if you want to chat. I understand if you don't want that or are not ready.")

How are text messages sent from apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal?

the available steganographic techniques for this phase of the call include:
• IP/UDP/TCP/RTP protocols steganography in network and transport layer of
TCP/IP stack,
• RTCP protocol steganography in application layer of TCP/IP stack,
• Audio watermarking (e.g. LSB, QIM, DSSS, FHSS, Echo hiding) in application
layer of TCP/IP stack,
• Codec SID frames steganography in application layer of TCP/IP stack,
• Intentionally delayed audio packets steganography in application layer of TCP/IP
stack,
• Medium dependent steganographic techniques like HICCUPS [15] for VoWLAN
(Voice over Wireless LAN) specific environment in data link layer of TCP/IP
stack.) 

Wow that's a lot of ways to send a secret message. Also don't forget about the PNG thing with cropping and the data staying in the file.

It is also worth noting that RTCP messages are based on IP/UDP protocols, so additionally, for one RTCP packet, both protocols can be used for covert transmission.

The layered nature of communication seems to in itself provide opportunities for additional or alternative messages. Like how using line breaks in text allows for the acrostic poem, all formatting and encoding paradigms can be opportunities for communication.

The primary application of audio watermarking was to preserve copyrights and/or
intellectual properties called DRM (Digital Right Management). However, this technique can be also used to create effective covert channel inside a digital content. 

Could audio-watermarking be used for piracy? Is that a joke worth making? Sounds complicated.

For VoIP service when highly delayed packet reaches the receiver it is recognized as lost and then discarded. We can use this feature to create new steganographic technique. If we are able to add enough delay to the certain packets at the transmitter side they will not be used for conversation reconstruction, and we can utilize their payloads for covert communication. 

Cool. But the idea that a message isn't valid unless it arrives on time is important in a more general sense, urgency is always a factor in communication. Even archives have urgency.

Proposed steganographic method has certain advantages. Most of all, although it is an application layer steganography technique, it is less complex than e.g. most audio steganography algorithms and the achieved bandwidth is comparable or even higher.

Tres cool.

t the most important steganographic method in VoIP communication experiment is IP/UDP/RTP protocols steganography, while it provides over 96% of achieved covert bandwidth value.

Other methods seem like a waste of time compared to this, unless you think you will be caught.

All Problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses, Simon Yuill

tµ~&;tÐW{5§_E-z²@jÀ¨ °  ÄÕÜ»53ãðwÏqØPu©ü¦ì¶âBõϸ>ksYo<Ëé21ÑhT6q^ УÑ8ÅV³ey1ßÛ½'\Lï|Gó;/¤À+À/À,À0̨̩ÀÀ/5www.metamute.org2http/1.1+3&$ å3f±(vº<ð+%ÕÖ FïÇeàôvq_^ÐOweÿ-ü (some characters removed from TCP message to allow for wiki formatting).

Alex McLean's feedforward

we can relate the gestures of the performer to the sounds that we hear and thus acquire a sense of the relation between the sound and its material production

Music as instrument proficiency, is this good? What's the difference between this and watching someone play a grand piano?

Livecoding dispenses with such ‘fetishes'

Mmmm no I dont think so. Exposing materiality so intensely is a fetish.

 It creates a virtue by exposing something that is normally concealed.

Yes this part is more the appeal I think.

Dave Griffith's ‘fluxus'

Tom Schouten's ‘PacketForth'

livecoding makes its own materials and practices of production available to others.

Kind of? I mean everyone can sing too that doesnt mean opera does this. There is still a skill in the craft and it is still part of the spectacle, thats ok though I think.

This ‘enabling the possibility of production by others' is often continued beyond the performance not only in the use of FLOSS-style distribution, but also in the conscious use of workshops as a means of presenting works and teaching the skills used in their creation.

Yah.

enabling the possibility of production by others

Sure that sounds lovely. How do other movements in the music world relate to this? For example people like Ben Levin. In many traditional music scenes there is a history of learning from the more experienced performers (or Victor Wooten's ideas about jazz).

Free Open Form Performance

But performance implies a primacy of the notation. Instead maybe we could have Free Open Form Imaginings (FOFI).

One of their first collections of scores, published in 1969 and called Nature Study Notes: Improvisation Rites, replaced the conventional copyright notice with the following:

No rights are reserved in this book of rites. They may be reproduced and performed freely. Anyone wishing to send contributions for a second set should address them to the editor: C. Cardew, 112 Elm Grove Road, London, SW13.

Rights for rites again.

As Edsger Dijkstra, one of the inventors of the interrupt system, noted:

It was a great invention, but also a Box of Pandora. Because the exact moments of the interrupts were unpredictable and outside our control, the interrupt mechanism turned the computer into a nondeterministic machine with a non-reproducible behaviour, and could we control such a beast?

Oh nooooo scary.

rather than treading lightly for fear of a crash, for some the error carried on an interrupt signal is a positive, productive opportunity. This is not restricted to computer interrupts. During rehearsals, Sun Ra would deliberately interrupt and trick his performers. The ‘errors' this produced, however, were not mistakes but rather forms of evolution:

There are no mistakes. If someone's playing off-key or it sounds bad, the rest of us will do the same. And then it will sound right.

This makes me feel very calm like everything will be ok. I just need to be friends with Sun Ra. Like the jaguars coming into the ritual and drinking the water.

In the voyage of the Arkestra, systems would collapse and be reborn on a daily basis.

Oh not sure I can go that fast though.

The turtle could either be an on-screen virtual character or a small robot that was instructed to move around their terrain

Notation is a way of making people move.

(Cardew). Does notation have to "make" people do things? This sounds weird coming from Kees. Notation like other written language is a means of communicating with the future, and thinking in the present?

Notational systems as a means of constructing, communicating and reflecting upon

Like this for example.

Papert's approach to computing was influenced by his previous involvement in radical left-wing politics - in the 1950s he had been involved in the group running Socialist Review in London. The LOGO Lab concept combined insights from Jean Piaget's and Lev Vygotsky's psychological studies of child development with the non-schooling principles of Ivan Illich. It advocated an approach in which, ‘the child programs the computer rather than the computer being used to program the child.'

Nice.

Papert pointed out that in conventional education errors had a purely negative connotation. When a student makes a mistake they are discredited for it, losing marks or being punished, thereby inculcating a fear of error, leading to an unwillingness to stray from conventional boundaries and take risks. For the hacker, conversely, what mattered is not whether or not a mistake is made but rather how creatively it can be responded to. 

Aaaaaaahhh its so cute and lovely <3

The danger lay in the fact that a trained musician, when confronted with an unfamiliar notation system, rather than responding to it directly, might fall back on their personal predispositions and ingrained habits... The trained musician approached a performance with a predefined system of producing sound against which the new notation was interpreted. 

This is a danger for anyone trained in reading anything, they will attempt to interpret what is in front of them.

The performer, therefore, could not rehearse such music but rather ‘trained' for it like a martial art, developing ways of acting upon contingency.

It is also the responsibility of the person writing the notation to encourage these other actions? The audience, the booking agent, the instrument builders, the bouncer...

the evolving knowledge, intentions and standards of the practitioner community acting as a form of version control identifying those practices which are most current and those which are conflicting or tangential.

This seems potentially the same as the gatekeeping practices of more established traditions, just less worked out? How do you make sure the version control doesnt get too powerful?

This led to the development of new performance venues, many situated directly within black communities, and of the conscious articulation of practice as a form of research.

https://linktr.ee/music_research_strategies

the fundamental contradiction confronting the Orchestra was perhaps its dependency upon its own constitution, the paradoxical aim of ‘legislating for noncomformity'.

Surely disbanding should eventually be the aim of a group like this? Devolving, shrinking, genuine obsolescence.

the rebirth of the author in a group attempting to move beyond such notions of singular authorship

This is so hard to escape.

The break-up, therefore, represented not the failure of its members, but rather the breaking of the limit between the formal structure of the score/constitution and the people who were the ‘substance' of the Orchestra.

It's a bit sad when this happens because the score/constitution is usually intended to be flexible, but sometimes it fails anyway.

There are parallels with Free Software's current reliance on copyleft and the GPL which can also be seen as a way of ‘legislating for noncomformity'. 

I assume the punchline that is coming for this is bottom-up rather than top-down? But top-down is a necessary defense sometimes. As long as copyright (or anything) is the hegemonic form, alternatives need to be either directly reactionary or inertly stable, able to survive without the pressure of the dominant system.

It is perhaps best therefore to view the GPL and copyleft as tactics 

Yah.

for under current law there is no magic licensing scheme that will bring an end to proprietary production.

Self-referential, generative licences. What can they do. Licence as a virus, forkbomb licence.

it is UNIX, with its networked, distributed filesystem, that created the basic notational inscription for these modes of production.

the factory as a single coherent unit of production has given way to amorphous networked systems.

collaboration within artistic practice valorised to a greater extent than ever before, and sometimes merely as an end in itself.

Nature Study Notes, Scratch Orchestra

composed

The composer. The designer. The author. The commander. The speaker. Most of these scores are written as imperatives. Except

Six deep breaths......

I'm doing it anyway, three breaths in. Three more. Typographically its a nice one. Punctus. Punctus. Punctus. Punctus. Punctus. Punctus. Deep breaths, it's over......

You dont have to be a scientist to do experiments.

Jeffrey Lee Lewis. This isnt a rule or a score, but it's a nice reminder.

Each player divides himself into three [underlined:] equal parts. 

Not an imperative, but seems even more essential because of that.

All parameters and dimensions are equal and as one.

Everything. Three things. One thing.

Bodily contact. Exchange of instruments (goods, objects). Cleaning operations. Courtesy.

This list is more a space of possibilities than an instruction. A field that can be performed within, and therefore a useful score (map) for the performer.

The drum is without form. A simple extension of the soul.

This is similar to the one above but is also partly an unmapping. A score (or rules) as a way of erasing previous rules and assumptions. An amendment. So looking and mapping and defining are ways of creating narratives for the future that allow possibilities and suggest paths. Is looking an act of control? What is the difference between ordering as in arranging and ordering as in commanding?

The Green Goddess, Aleister Crowley

hermetically open

What is my relationship with rules?

For here was the headquarters of no common man — no less than a real pirate — of Captain Lafitte, who not only robbed his neighbors, but defended them against invasion.

The barrier between divine and human things is frail but inviolable; the artist and the bourgeois are only divided by a point of view. “A hair divides the false and true.”

It's a matter of cybernetics I suppose. The kubernētēs, the steering of the ship. Using or abusing the wind? Is it possible to be interested in control and not be a dick? What would an autocybernetic assessment reveal? Of a person or a group? Who decides to perform an autocybernetopsy?

sip the icy opal; endure till all things change insensibly before your eyes, you changing with them; till you become as gods, knowing good and evil, and this also — that they are not two but one.

On Socialist Cybernetics, Accelerationist Dreams, and Tiqqun’s Nightmares, Paul Buckermann

from institute of network cultures

an abyss of technology’s potential for emancipatory progress

ritual is the most important programming technology of the human body.

Unattributed quote on this raar Nooscope facebook page.

tiqqun-the-cybernetic-hypothesis

Today’s power – Tiqqun claims – is driven by the cybernetic hypothesis, which assumes that biological, physical and social patterns are programmed and programmable.

Gene sequencing. Genetic modification. This feels very creepy. Where is the autonomy and the turbulent flow.

There is no top, no head or absolute single authority, no central navigator. 

Does anyone know where we are going then?

‘Panic makes the cyberneticians panic’ – because chaotic situations make states of equilibriums implode and limit prognostic thinking.

Panic attack. Out of control. That's how it all starts, but is disrupting the power enough to change the system? Maybe but I dont know where we're going.

The practice of attacking, sabotaging or overloading infrastructure can be seen as a form of resistance.

Accelerate Manifesto, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek

reject the leftist fetishism for what is called ‘folk politics’: flat democratic organization, spatial limitations, romanticist deceleration and folkloristic localism.

I dont know if these are fetishes so much as dreams, is it better to acknowledge they are unachievable or to try anyway? AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE DEFEATED.

Technologies are understood as tools and conditions for planning, thinking and doing. A consequence of accelerationist politics is that infrastructure, communication technology, medication, mathematical methods etc., all developed and produced under the reign of capitalism, do not have to be destroyed but to be applied differently, be rebuild and hacked.

But how do you hold it in another way. Is there a different way to navigate the cloud or to use Adobe for example. A silly way. A noisy way. What is a corporation for?

It's only fair to tell you
I'm absolutely cuckoo

The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs.

Is love radical?

The surplus of Will must find issue in the elevation of the individual towards the godhead; and the method of such elevation is by religion, love, and art. Now these three things are indissolubly bound up with wine, for they are themselves species of intoxication.

The Green Goddess, Aleister Crowley.

Can I use the mechanisms of the state to help me to tell you: I'm in love with you?

the only existing first person account of the birth of modern computing in Russia.

One problem in the Soviet Union was, for example, the lack of standardization and coordination for computer networks. In the US and the Western World, general communication protocols, like TCP/IP, or addressing systems, like DNS, were widely implemented over a battled period spanning into the 1980s. Without such standards for digital communication and because of incompatible hardware and software the bunch of different soviet networks were never to be connected. Each one was sheltered and veiled by intransparency and the fear of losing already gained privileges.

TCP/IP defeated communism? Winners are efficient and efficacious?

President Salvador Allende lead the multiparty alliance that ranged from the Communist Party to Christian socialists.

Are all political beliefs religious? Mazdak.

Stafford Beer talking about recursion and control. Holons are silly? Or useful? They used telex machines to instantaneously monitor and control the economy, because telex machines were cheap. But Chile was too long and thin and the workers kept striking so they lost control. "If you've only got one computer then ipso facto you're centralised."

Starting in August 1972, the team constructed a hexagon room in central Santiago. It contained seven swiveling chairs with control buttons in the armrest. The geometric forms were used to control the slides, because the future participants were members of the government or factory workers who could not properly use a keyboard. 

Geometric formations. The unicursal hexigram. The figure of love.

Working on a regular keyboard was a competence of female secretaries at this time and the designers aimed for direct control of the men in the Opsroom instead of any intermediation. 

The woman as the intermediary. The machine as her replacement. Ectogenesis.

A question for contemporary accelerationism could therefore be: What is the state today, should it be abolished, and how should a post-capitalist society in whole be organized instead? Or repeating Lenin’s formulas with the deep hope for better answers than those we know: What is to be done?, and Where to begin?

Can any of these questions be answered in isolation from assumptions about the answers to the others?

Musimathics Volume I, Gareth Loy

Composition and Methodology (Chapter 9)

What can composition be other than control?

evol I

Approaching composition [through its methodology] has the great advantage of enabling us to relate the arts and sciences, to see their similarities and differences in sharp relief.

MUSIMAT programming language, which appears to have been written for this book. Is this like when Tolkien wrote Elvish and all those other languages. Has anyone ever written a programming language inside the world of a book? If you make up a language in your book, does that make the book fictional? Is Principia Mathematica fictional?

Methodology is what allows us to construct the wheel, plant crops, solve equations, and write symphonies. Methodology is the DNA of human culture: it carries information that enables societies to function and to persist from generation to generation. The proper study of composition is the study of methodology, and the full appreciation of methodology requires an understanding of algorithm.

A bit like the weird Nooscope facebook page thing above: "ritual is the most important programming technology of the human body." Although this one acknowledges more that methods or rituals are something that exist in cultures, not individuals. Also a method as opposed to a ritual, seems to have more emphasis on a productive material outcome while a ritual is more a transfer (celebration, affirmation, exploration) of ideas.

How can we find the greatest common divider of 91 and 416, which we almost certainly do not 'know'?

What is the nature of knowledge? These seem like an interesting choice for a pair of integers. I notice both numbers are two less than 93 and 418, and 93=418. 93-AIWASS-418. And 418 is the number of Abrahadabra.

A B R A H A D A B R A
 A B R A H A D A B R
  A B R A H A D A B
   A B R A H A D A
    A B R A H A D
     A B R A H A
      A B R A H
       A B R A
        A B R
         A B
          A

A delegated external choice-making entity is called an oracle. If a method requires consulting an oracle of any kind, it is automatically art, not algorithm. We should also distinguish between choice-making and choice-accepting. The latter is always subjective.

Wait I thought algorithms were oracles? Choice-making and choice-accepting as two decoupled phenomena is really interesting. Remembering that deciding to act is not exactly the same as acting. Why is it called ex-act? Sometimes e- or ex- are intensifiers rather than meaning "out of". And act as in perform, so exact means to thoroughly perform or do. Or to misinterpret it a little, to outperform.

The analysis of methodology can reveal the aesthetic agenda of its creator.

Why are you doing it that way?

16 case-stories re-imagining the practice of lay-out, Open Source Publishing

in the printed copy it says source files on git but constant moved to gitlab, but the pdf is still there.

Made as part of the Libre Graphics Research Unit.

dissatisfied with the shrink-wrapped relationships that proprietary software allows

Is FLOSS software really more varied? I think so but a tricky thing to prove. And especially are the things that are made with it more varied? Even harder to prove. Also, slightly related, is colour symbolism provably becoming more homogenous?

[Tools are] "path dependent", meaning that software, like any technology, is often the result of more or less arbitrary conflations of people and situations, sometimes leading to unreflected fossilisations (the text-box model) or other times unnecessarily overlooking relevant practices (chevronnage). How can we change the path of these tools, how to think about their direction?

Conflations, re parallel ports, can be good. I like that the language of this is getting vectory already.

Four axes of orientation emerged:
1. Digital Sensitivity.
2. Process Awareness.
3. Extended Dimensions.
4. Engage and Disengage.

Digital Sensitivity

Graphical Shell: putting coding closer to the designer, in this suggestion like a tool panel (brushes, layers) in a software environment.

It s a way to expose the inner vocabulary of a program, in a more radical way than most APIs would enable.

Illustrator scripting and coding for animation/interaction (eg p5.js) do generally fall short of this "live" element that is being suggested here. Maybe a functional model would be more like how music coding often works (ChucK, Supercollider, LinuxSampler) where there is a virtual machine disconnected from the part sending the commands (the part you write the code in). So possibly to make it a little less instantaneous than is suggested here, you write code snippets and send them to the canvas or composition, where they can live out their lives, be removed, or be updated. ChucK I think does a particularly fluid job of this.

Relational Layout: This one has been covered now by things like Processing I guess?

Shared undo histories: Programs already save undo histories, so why can't we wite those changes as commits? This idea got also referred to as "shared action lists", but that sounds a lot less promiscuous. We liked the possibility of distributing painful discoveries and propagating our mistakes

I really like this one. But documentation of mistakes in a competitive professional field is a much bigger issue that just sharing creative changes in direction between the people working on a layout job. How else can that part of the world be more honest and open? Are the consequences of admitting mistakes really so high that they need to be kept secret?

Conversational control:

If we see design as a practice that seeks to articulate collisions, how could computers be of use to help organise them, to make them visible and legible?

Well there have been lots of changes to how computers can be used to communicate visually since this was written, but I wonder if they have been in the direction that is implied here. What is difficult about communicating during design? Different visions for the project, different opinions on what is appropriate or best, different goals. Can these tensions be navigated in a caring and respectful way? Using computers if it's completely necessary, I guess.

Process Awareness

Orchestras:

We are interested in tools that have ways of expressing their own character, and that are open for inter-action between processes.

Instrumented versions of Scribus, MyPaint, SketchSpace and GIMP were made to send their actions (everything that was saved to the undo-history) as HTTP GET requests to the Underweb.

This also ties into the "live" aspect of structures like ChucK and SuperCollider, real-time collaboration. These sound fun and interesting, do these workflows exist outside of computers? Do we ever draw on the same page together? I guess so and it's really fun.

Elision / Collision

In your mind you can keep several simultaneous visions of [a place] as an abstract thought. But as soon as you want to visualize them on screen, they will fight for pixel space. Transparencies, layers have each their own system of coordinates. And if we superimpose the different layers, the empty spaces will become a surface on which things can be projected and it will lose its very quality of active void. 

Extended Dimensions

This section is boring for me.

Engage and Disengage

A few ideas in this section about the line as a unit of text, an ignored unit caught between the glyph and the text box. Something fluid and dynamic that has its own agency. In the cut-up technique (thinking more Genesis P-Orridge than Dada here) the text box is divided into lines and the text's individuality is destroyed. Self-other, life-death binaries are blended into a oneness smoothie. Maybe the weakness of the text-box method is already inside itself: columns. The column is another in-between unit, not quite text block, not quite page. A disobedient page, one that acknowledges it is only a text box and laughs. There are no pages on the internet. Here is a cut-up poem from these "pages":

Related to

A 'lezarde' is the phenomenon that in a typeset

space shapes a never ending tale. an

flow into separate lines and manually place a

out. really

Crossing the river:

Aside from the Charon reference (ferryman, κυβερνήτης, is this a Virgil or a Yeats reference now? I dont know too many layers today.) White space and rivers as an active void. The authority of the empty space and giving it the respect it deserves. The space as an actor, distance as a force.

The Second Coming, WB Yeats

            turning                        
           cannot hear              
Things fall apart;                      
Mere anarchy                                
The blood-                       and everywhere   
                innocence 
                  conviction,    
            passion    intensity.

Surely                            
Surely                                 
                   Hardly are those words out   
       vast                            
         my sight: somewhere                          
                                                
                             the sun,   
Is moving                                       
     shadows of the                  birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That                                
Were vexed to night                            
And                   its hour            at last,   
                           to be born 

The Future Looms, Sadie Plant (again)

This actual space is not merely another space, but a virtual reality. Nor is it as it often appears in the male imaginary: as a cerebral flight from the mysteries of matter. There is no escape from the meat, the flesh, and cyberspace is nothing transcendent. These are simply the disguises which pander to man's projections of his own rear-view illusions; reproductions of the same desires which have guided his dream of technological authority and now become the collective nightmare of a soulless integration. Entering the matrix is no assertion of masculinity, but a loss of humanity; to jack into cyberspace is not to penetrate, but to be invaded. Neuromancer's cowboy, Case, is well aware of this: 

he knew-he remembered-as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read. (Gibson, 1985: 285) 

Cyberspace is the matrix not as absence, void, the whole of the womb, but perhaps even the place of woman's affirmation. This would not be the affirmation of her own patriarchal past, but what she is in a future which has yet to arrive but can nevertheless already be felt. There is for Irigaray another side to the screens which 

already moves beyond and stops short of appearance, and has no veil. It wafts out, like a harmony that subtends, envelops and subtly 'fills' everything seen, before the caesura of its forms and in time to a movement other than scansion in syncopations. Continuity from which the veil itself will borrow the matter-foundation of its fabric. (Irigaray, 1991: 116) 

This fabric, and its fabrication, is the virtual materiality of the feminine; home to no-one and no thing, the passage into the virtual is nevertheless not a return to the void. This affirmation is 'without subject or object', but 'does not, for all that, go to the abyss': the blind immateriality of the black hole was simply projected by man, who had to believe that there was nothingness and lack behind the veil. 

On the Inconvenience of Other People, Lauren Berlant

2: The Commons

 L O V E   W I L L
A L W A Y S F A I L 
 T R Y A N Y W A Y 
  T R Y A N Y W A 
   Y T R Y A N Y 
    W A Y T R Y 
       A N Y 
        W A
         Y

1: Sex

once you let in the deaths, all that follows is life

but I'm so afraid of dying how is this possible.

concepts as tools with which to loosen other concepts. to loosen an object is to make it available to transition.

counterconcepts. what else can we do? where else can we go? can you describe where we are and what were already doing differently? can you draw different borders and make different predictions?

Christina sharpe, in the wake

[an infrastructure of feeling] confirms and solidifies the sediment of many proximate kinds of sociality, including pasts and futures as they express themselves in the present. to think infrastructure... is to focus on the generation of forms of life that broadly bind and extend relationality and the world seen as substance and concept.

infrastructure as the generation of life and its relations, world seeing as world building and poeisis.

a glitch is an interruption within a transition. a glitch is also a claim about the revelation of an infrastructural failure. the repair or replacement of broken infrastructure is necessary for any form of sociality to extend itself, but a few definitional problems arise from this observation. one is defining what distinguishes a transitional infrastructure from the ordinary relational scene that generates the ongoingness of the world through some cobbled-together inventive and repetitive activity; the other is about what repair, of the beyond of glitch, looks like both generally and amid a catastrophe.

crisis infrastructuralism as an epistemology emerges when we are compelled to understand that nothing from above or on the outside is holding the world together solidly; the emergent threads become manifestly loose and knotty and multiply while still reproducing some aspects of life. 

aaaaaaaaahh 😬 where are we going what the fuck is happening?

terms for transition

this sounds lovely, as opposed to code of conduct or other behaviour defining laws. our terms are based on our boundaries and help us define a safe space together, they limit possiblity in a way that protects and encourages moving together like electromagnets in a cathode ray tube. there is something we are moving towards, we are a projection in a material sense.

later we learn that the place stinks, too, denoting not that people have died here but that they have lived. lived life had an impact on the room, and the atmosphere is thick with the enigma of what it all added up to and why it was abandoned.

is it? the room doesn't even seem that abandoned there are two people here and they might even be in love. i dont think LB is right to say what they are experiencing, which seems completely compulsive but without any obsession, is not a form of love. it is certainly detatched at some level.

Tom, like most romantics, aspires to tweak conventionality and call it revolution.

in the context of the film and this book this is presented as a bad thing, is it? do revolutions have to be intense to get your respect?

in these architectures of intermediacy, people experience the ways that they do not line up with their usual selves or identities. they are in transition: they do transitional things, eat strange food, consume strange media, comporting themselves unusually. they have suspended identities because they are somewhere amid what David Bowie calls "the stream of warm impermanence".

the erotic relationship as a transitory space or "non-place". this all sounds fun but also so disorienting. it could take effort to swim here but of course it would be better to simply surf the current. this means trusting and giving up control. and what then if the experience is still unpleasant, or offputting, or even hurting or causing damage? if it takes effort and control to make this not even better in the sense of improvement but better in the sense of tolerable? is it ever right to swim instead of surf, and when?

at stake is finding an idiom of reciprocity without fetishism, without building genealogies, kinship, or a "life"

desire for the transitional event itself rather than the effect.

that's the joke of the zipper, the donut, the sink, all form, insofar as form is not a thing but a relation.

2: the commons

its not only that you can't guarantee consequences in advance. its that you can't be certain how you'll feel about or be able to live on in the disturbance you created, that comes from the substantial challenge to subjectivity, reciprocity, and worlds that, in some sense, you desired. conflict is inevitable, reciprocity is always negotiated, all objects remain enigmas, and ends do not usually provide a sufficient summary judgement of a project's value.

i dont think it was meant in this way but this fits well in the context of creative labour or the creative process generally. or labour generally? where are the boundaries between acting and making and working? are those boundaries useful? being and becoming and skiing and skicoming. where does the dusk stop and the dawn begin? depending on the season there can sometimes be no true night, assuming there are seasons. are circles round? how round? what about the moon? what does it spin around? its axis or the earth or the sun or if you give it 270 million years maybe something further.

the practice of an aesthetics of interruption where any observation releases a pressure both to stay there forever and to refuse to become absorbed in the mirror of a suspension that refuses time.

Fluron tempting a life filled with treasure, but it's a waste of time: refuse, refuse.

desire to witness complicity sometimes feels like alchemical hygiene.

astral mirror holding a pure reflection. aparecio en el vidria la palabra "libertad". o swallow, swallow.

collectively, the dispossessed self-possess... their coordination not only counters the saturation of everyday defeat by work and absence of work, but also stages a becoming that might lead to belonging. if it works, the revised bodily habit of nonsovereignty creates a collective orientation, a shared subjectivity. it does not erase individuality but creates a mutually transforming affect-sphere where it has no "right" to be.

collaboration clears space for the common, which has no form but offers a point of return through the creative use of proximity, improvised synchronicity, and spiky kinships no less intimate for the ambivalence.

synchronisation is completely form though? how did we decide to be synchronised, are people recognising it, are we enjoying it should we celebrate it? where is responsibility in this, do people have expectations? wouldnt it be cool if i jumped and you caught me? but you will catch me right?

”we are in it together!" who is "we"? what is "it"? fantasies of democracy as the experience of collectivity equal exposure to vulnerability tried to establish a ground where there is no ground.

commons-ing means inconveniently building and feeling together within but against the standards and norms of capitalism and democracy as it stands. or what if we just. would be ok if i. if you dont mind were gonna. an episode that doesnt fit.

3: On being in life without wanting the world

the prolific splits of affect and attention in the face of disturbing events and insecure objects provide opportunities to hold out for life detached from the damage wrought by the usual ways that making up a life can use up a person.

If the objects are shattered then they will of course become affectively more confusing split or complicated. There is an emotional investment required for this undefining and refining. It is not something that should be thrown upon others or entered into lightly. And yet it escapes another more usual type of damage and using up.

 the very spectre of self-induced finitude appears in a dissociative poetics when life as an x keeps on hitting the limit

sometimes it feels like I'm clipping

an exhausted, historically saturated being moves around life without unconscious fantasy or compulsive symbolisation filling up "the hole in the real". The protagonist's dissociative sensorium sees the world and is in it, and at the same time has turned elsewhere—because it must, because it needs to, because it did, or to test out ways of flourishing.

The obligations of being without fantasy and symbolisation, of not wanting to be here. The drive of being in an undesired world.

Here is another way of thinking about object loss: when an ordinary form of life is radically disturbed such that a subject's or people's sense of continuity is broken, what results is the release of affective enmeshment from its normative attachment habits. In other words, when one's attention is bound to something that organises one's energy or interest, that very relation, for good or ill, provides an infrastructure for understanding and moving through a situation or world... the energy released from a broken analogy... the freed energy and attention can be inconvenient, even frightening, because without the object organising your inconvenience drive or your fantasies of the stabilising object, you're now at loose ends that are threatening; at the same time, those energies are available for recomposing the world, causality, and possibilities. This is how dissociation can be at once a blockage and a defense whose cleavages can threaten and protect the attachment to life.

Oof sometimes this book gets really heavy it should come with a warning. It's so difficult to live without the infrastructure as it was and is. But it was and is unbearable. It has to be broken, it has to change, something's got to give.

the question is not how to lose an object but how to loosen it, how to make it available for different kinds of attachment, use, form, concept, scene, world... disintegrated existence as a thing in itself, an effect of subordination, a necessary transition, and sometimes as a confirming mode of being in a world defined by a menacing threat that is structural, if by 'structural' we mean the activity of predictable life within complexly knotted fields of force, resources, and activity that shape our imaginaries of value and of what it's possible to do about them.

Disintegrated existence as an effect, transition and mode of being. Disintegration as in not integrated, not part of the structure or at least a bit loose. Allowing new imaginaries of value and possibility. How do things disintegrate? This will damage the structure for sure (great, rock on) but there are people involved here be careful and caring.

if unlearning it isn't an explicit project of loosening one's and the world's anchoring objects, how else can one inhibit going along with things because of the sour realism "it is what it is"? Here there's an offering of how to construct and occupy the historical present.

I got you a historical present. Oh geez, thanks so much. I kept the receipt in case it doesn't fit. Ok I'll try it but yeah maybe.

saturated by the flashbacks that reminds him of Jim's sustaining love and insecure about how to proceed through space and the present, his flirtation with the possibility of a world would feel like a pretence and a defeat of the psychological, social, and political project of being frank about desire.

So which is it, do we be frank about it, is it all a pretence? I don't know the difference between the object and the objet a. And I don't really want to know the difference maybe? If the lack is there anyway why not just desire whatever you want who cares. Whatever makes you happy, in the hypothetical future. Time doesn't ever exist, never has never will. Fuck this shit.

what are we living for if our idea of being a protagonist is all wrong, overinflated in order for us to protect ourselves from our ambivalence about needing the world we receive and our confusion about what to do with tenderness and vulnerability to formal and informal power?

Ummmmmm. The answer in is fact other people but it's not a good answer. It comes from a place of personal insecurity and lack of internal trust. The ambivalence is absolutely in the sense it it meant in this book generally: an extremely complicated affect of not giving a fuck and being extremely dependant on. Ambi on the edges. Maybe something more centred would be better here but this is not my experience so far.

then what does it mean to give up plotting for life?... can the freedom from a plot and a sitting with the modal multivalences of affect provide space not only for resting and thinking but also for loosening up into dissociation's alternative prospects?

...vide space...

intense flailings at establishing patterns... traumatic formations... 'history is what hurts' and turns the sensorium into a survival zone that tries to defend against the damage of dissociation.

The world has been affectively destructured through catastrophe, it this attempt at connecting just an attempt at making sense? What the fuck is going on? What are you doing here Stephen?

for Caruth, any cure would involve converting dissociation into narrative, or whatever form of encounter would allow affective stuckness to get moved into a new pattern-form somewhere. It does not require a healing narrative that erases the symptom, but a virtually physical sense that the very movement of figuration is a movement of reconfiguration that can loosen the symptom into material for a better mode of existing. Adorno responds in a similar fashion to this imperative not to give trauma the last laugh, this time by reimagining lyric subjectivity. The lyric mode splits the subject into a symptom of the kinds of capitalist alienation that both provide an argument for work as a space of self-realization and allow for love of all sorts to perform a kind of freedom, whether in marriage or friendship. The time-boxing that constitutes the capitalist logic of the everyday forecloses the political resonance of life-reproductive action for reshaping the general world. A dissociated aesthetic, then, would be both evidence of damage and a pathway to an overcoming that does not neutralise being overwhelmed but makes room for affective creativity at the level of description and association, which in turn changes what the object is and can do.

I can't focus enough to take this all in right now but I can see there are things there for me. I'm distracted by my music and I'm tired and super emotional this week. I need rest but I also need to keep moving. I need to pay attention but I'm already doing it, more than ever before. I'm turning my skin into a map of everything inside it and I'm spinning the world is spinning around me is the the world around me is spinning around in the world spinning around me spinning. In a self centred way? Ideally. If I revolve then the world in a physical way revolves around me and I can locate myself: the blurry thing in the centre of the rest of the blur. A different type of dizziness that draws attention to the original one bit also covers it up. Maybe they're not different. The spinning mixes things up.

Christopher bollas describes mood as the affective leftover of childhood anxiety triggered into animation by an encounter or scene in the present.

something slower and more simple at first, more proximate to relief than repair, and that uses the meanwhile structure to generate a sense of the impasse and its potential transformation into next actions.

the very movement of figuration is a movement of reconfiguration that can loosen the symptom into material for a better mode of existing, but relief before repair.

drawing lines of association among what's been separated and deemed inconvenient builds a case for refiguring what passes as structure.

I suppose this is what I would like to practice, summarised quite well. Well that's handy.

Tompkins 'on the gelatinous'

the middle of life is an endless rhythm of incidents in the life... These episodes hit surprising limits: you never know when they're going to end because situations stop without achieving climax or closure, or anything we could recall as a shape whose causes are resolved in consequences... There are no beginnings, only scenes to be in the middle of. 

Oh my god this is only the first paragraph I've read today and already so much.

Anthony reed thinks of the lyrical subject of her "I" as not needing to be self-identical not needing to be universal: local and on the move.

Anthony reed, freedom time

why resist puns when you are trying desperately to stay in life

puns break language; they're dissociative play. Agression and fun ungoverned... drawing lines of association among what's been separated and deemed inconvenient builds a case for refiguring what passes as structure

to squat and move around in the ellipsis denies norms their capacity to solidify the referent, to confront its uncanny substance as a gelatinous object of knowledge

The Community Memory Project, An Introduction, The Community Memory Project

The designers of Community Memory would like to see a world not broken up into nation-states or corporate states, but one built upon many overlapping regions of concern: from household to neighbourhood to interest group or work group, from geographical region to globe, where decisions are made by all those affected.

dreams of unmediated person-to-person communication, was this impossible before computers? a bulletin board and soapbox that anyone (but accessibility) can add to. how do computers make it easier and also how do they make it harder? easier: non geographic communities are easier to form, anonymity can be liberating, distances can be made smaller, intimacy can be increased. harder: anonymity can be cruel, computers can be confusing, distance can be frustrating, intimacy can be limited. do computers help us to navigate complexity or throw it in our faces to scare and intimidate us? when someone opens a channel of communication from home or the other side of the planet what happens? you realise yet again that they are a real person. you remember the last time you laughed together, or the time it all got a bit too intense. you laugh at something new. you cry together, you speak, you listen. you entangle some more just like every time you talk to anyone. even attempted communication has to be appreciated, and if its successful should be celebrated. we're still just trying to work it all out together, same as we've always done.

The Forge and the Crucible, Mircia Eliade

the magic of the instruments. the art of creating tools is essentially superhuman—either divine or demoniac (for the smith also forges murderous weapons)... the ambivalent magic of stone weapons, both lethal and beneficient, like the thunderbolt itself, was transmitted and magnified in the new instruments forged of metal.

creation is a sacrifice.

what Nature cannot perfect in a vast space of time we can achieve in a short space of time by our art'

from the Summa Perfectionis

The theme of sacrifice (or of personal sacrifice) at the time of smelting, which is a mythico-ritual motif more or less related to the idea of mystic union between a human being (or a couple) and metals, is especially important. morphologically, this theme should belong with the great class of sacrifices of creation whose primary model in the cosmogonic myth I have already described. to ensure the 'marriage of metals' in the smelting process, a living being must 'animate' the operation and the best means of achieving this is by the sacrifice, the transfer of a life. the soul of the victim changes its fleshy envelope: it changes its human body for a new 'body'—a building, an object, even an operation—which it makes Alice, or animates. 

Fusing metals (joining, creating, synthesising, transformation of holy matter) requires a sacrifice to succeed. Do people still believe this? Is there always a cost to creation? Does extracting metals or other resources from their natural state come at a cost or a need to sacrifice something else?

poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie

But where cosmogonic symbols were presented in an embryological context, the creation of objects was equivalent to a childbirth.

all creation as a form of giving birth, but in fact obstetrics or abortion. scary.

further reading:

1. ecstasy, robery johnston
2. la chamanisme et las techniques archaiques de l'extase, mircea eliade
3. alchemy, ej holmyard

as 'masters of fire', shamans and sorcerers swallow burning coal, handle red-hot iron and walk on fire... these powers indicate access to a certain ecstatic state or, on another cultural plane, to an unconditioned state of perfect spiritual freedom.

And by extenstion smiths, potters and alchemists as 'masters of fire' have access to the same state. is this idea still believed of 'artists' in the modern sense of the word, that those who make things artificially, by artifice, have access to some ecstatic or spiritual state. will this belief about these artists be superceded by rationality the same way as it has been for other artists (smiths, chemists). somehow the potter is also still thought of in this way. but in fact the artist is making tools.

in Bali there are initiation rites for apprentice smiths and during their work mantra are uttered before each tool is used.

the smith, in virtue of the sacred character of his craft, the mythologies and genealogies of which he is the keeper, and his association with the shaman and the warrior, has come to play a significant part in the creation and diffusion of epic poetry.

there would appear to have existed, therefore, at several different cultural levels (which is a mark of very great antiquity), a close connection between the at of the Smith, the occult sciences (shamanism, magic, healing, etc) and the art of song, dance and poetry. these overlapping techniques, moreover, appear to have been handed down in an aura of sacred mystery comprising initiations, specific rituals and 'trade secrets'. 

transdisciplinary practices. forging tools and making art are deeply connected with eachother and mystic or magic practices, they interact with the world on a similar plane. is art magic or toolmaking? yes both. homo faber. is there a link between the words fable and faber?

the 'mastery of fire', common both to magician, shaman and smith, was, in Christian folklore, looked upon as the work of the devil

yes burn it to the ground.

(certainly the obvious or consciously accessible significance can be a matter for discussion, but to limit the problem in this way is to sin through an excess of rationalism. a folktale does not address itself to the awakened secularised consciousness: it exerts its power in the deep recesses of the psyche, and nourishes and simulates the imagination... images, inspired by tales, act directly on the psyche of the audience even when, consciously, the latter does not realise the primal significance of any particular symbol.)

this is maybe the best parenthesis i have ever read.

the survarna tantra affirms that by eating 'killed mercury' (nasta-pista), man becomes immortal... even the alchemist's urine and faeces are capable of transmuting copper into gold.

Ingestion as destructive, egestion as creative. Eating is killing and death. Making shit. Digestion as transformation and the body as synthesiser.

as far as the Indian alchemist is concerned, operations on mineral substances were not, and could not be, simple chemical experiments. on the contrary, they involved his karmic situation; in other words they had decisive spiritual consequences.

acknowledging that the spiritual, the belief systems, the world of the mind and of the observer are entangled with the physical and material reality. there is no way to measure, experiment or observe without coming from an ideological standpoint somewhere, it needs to be addressed, accepted, taken into consideration. things only exist and are only seen from certain (or uncertain) social and cultural perspectives.

further reading european/arabic/alexandrian alchemy:

1. fulcanelli
2. eugene canseliet
3. j. evola
4. alexander von bernus
5. rené alleau

modern man is incapable of experiencing the sacred in his dealings with matter; at most he can achieve an aesthetic experience... it is clear that a thinking dominated by cosmological symbolism created an experience of the world vastly different from that accessible to modern man. to symbolic thinking the world is not only 'alive' but also 'open': an object is never simply itself (as is the case with modern consciousness), it is also a sign of, of a repository for, something else.

openness as undefined, and the ability to be otherwise.

historians of science have rightly emphasised that the authors of these [ancient oriental alchemical] prescriptions make use of quantities and numbers which would prove, in their view, the scientific character of these operations.

as with David Graeber, an assumption, even here, that numbers are scientific. yes numbers can be used to measure but counting also has a strong mystical element, and numbers as symbols are still a thing even today. the sexual power of 69, the fear instilled by 1945, lucky number 7, buildings that skip floor 13. why is he called andre3000? or 6ix9ine, or 2pac? iphone X, duvel 666, digits have strong emotive powers.

this is an interesting question to me, the mystical origins of science and rationality. descartes, the roman grid, numerology. the vector hidden inside every raster measurement. the nonbinary reality of data.

it is the conception of a complex and dramatic Life of Matter which constitutes the originality of alchemy as opposed to classical Greek science.

the dramatic Life of Matter. transsubstantiation.

melansis (black), leukosis (white), xanthosis (yellow), and iosis (red)... nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, rubedo, sometimes viriditas, sometimes cauda pavonis.

states and stages. phases. colour symbolism.

[death] was the reduction of substances to the materia prima, to the massa confusa, the fluid, shapeless mass corresponding—on the cosmological plane—to chaos... 'perform no operation till all be made water'.

oh fuck this chapter is going to get intense, i already want to quote the entire first paragraph. dissolving gold in aqua regia. reintegration of chaos. aquatic symbolism. through water all things must be destroyed. a baptism as a death. it's a bit too personal but the whole is in every part and it all needs to die.

opportet operatorem interesse operi

the work is us. we are the work. there is no separation between being and making. whaaaaat. but yeah maybe i guess.

the vas mirabile of the alchemist, his furnaces, his retorts, play an even more ambitious role [than putting him in the role of Time]. these pieces of apparatus are at the very centre of a return to primordial chaos, of a rehearsal of the cosmogony. substances die in them and are revived, to be finally transmuted to gold.

did alchemists really believe this? maybe they just wanted free money. its a nice story and that doesnt depend on us believing it or the original practitioners believing it either, but it would be interesting to know how they felt about it.

an extremely complex symbolism associates the terrifying fire-theophanies with the sweetest flames of mystic love and with the luminous manifestations of the divine as well as with the innumerable 'combustions' and 'passions' of the soul. at many levels, fire, flame, dazzling light, inner heat, express spiritual experiences, the incarnation of the sacred, the proximity of God.

i am starting to like fire more than i used to because of this book. i mean literal fire has always fascinated terrified and attracted me but i am starting to see how that elemental power comes across in other matter and forces too.

the conclusion i was expecting starts on page 172 (a fine number), its all good but ill grab a bit:

it is in the specific dogma of the nineteenth century, according to which man's true mission is to transform and improve upon nature and become her master, that we must look for the authentic continuation of the alchemists dream.

industrialisation as the control of nature and acceleration of time. the total transmutation of nature, its transformation into 'energy'. the myth of infinite progress. supplanting time. efficient exploitation. synthetic products. organic chemistry. the dream of creating.

it is in work finally secularised, in work in its pure state, numbered in hours and units of energy consumed, that man feels the implacable nature of temporal duration, is full weight and slowness.

insatiable boredom, inescapable death. that's all were left with when we get rid of magic and produce.

the secularisation of work is like an open wound in the body of modern society

for a more modern (more realistic?) account of the spiritual elements of alchemy: spiritual alchemy, mike a zuber.

and older less realistic: mary ann atwood ethan allen hitchcock

On Type, Jonathan C Creasy

such pieces collectively

1988 interview about technical revolution, vilem flusser

https://youtu.be/lyfOcAAcoH8?feature=shared

the structure of images involved a specific way of looking at the world which is the mythical way

and (this note written after the next to be less linear) in breughel the most mystical images are the deepest into the picture, a demon speaking with an angel far into the sky, a cross or gallows deep back on a hilltop.

hostorical progressive thinking is being replaced by a new type of thinking that i would like to call systemic or structural

maybe. but multithreading is usually an illusion. not to say it cant have an effective apparent parallelism. and not to say that serial is in any way better, it is in many ways worse. but i suppose right now im questioning is this really non linearity, can we break further. in a breughel painting it is impossible to resist being pulled into the distance, being sunk to ground. to the extent that the figures are hard to focus on. berlant says something about flatness when they are talking about in the air in the commons chapter:

another use of flatness: to put a wedge in causality. here the liberal world picture crashes to the floor as the group stands still in the absence of confidence about connection

abraham moles

A Thousand Plateaus, Dolce et Gabbana

Every time desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of immanence, a priest is behind it. The priest cast the triple curse on desire: the negative law, the extrinsic rule, and the transcendent ideal.

Do things that are non-representational. Birth of the new.

to express is always to sing the glory of God. Every stratum is a judgement of God

Debt, David greaber

these two elements—the violence and the quantification—are intimately linked. in fact its almost impossible to find one without the other.

what about sudoku? sometimes this argument sounds like all numbers are bad. what about 93 or 418? what about 22x10 or DCLXVI. whats the difference between virtue and vice?

i remember thinking: 'suckers!' and so they were

omg dave you will always be a hero <3 (talking about social theorists pre 08)

in 1894, the greenbackers, who pushed for detatching the dollar from gold entirely to allow the government to spend freely on job-creation campaigns, invented the idea of the march on Washington—an idea that was to have endless resonance in US history. L. Frank Baum's book the wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is often held to be a parable for the populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the free silver platform.

alchemical transformation to gold as a form of escape or transcendence of the market. if we print our own money it is not to make ourselves rich but to destroy the system that keeps us all poor. fuck you, i dont want to play this game anymore. if we are to be purified we need to melt it all down, white noise, the generative matrix.

A man, being born, is a debt; by his own self he is born to Death, and only when he sacrifices does he redeem himself from Death.

From the Brahmanas. geld = guilt. primordial debt theory. living is a debt to the gods repayable through sacrifice (oxen) or tithe (gold and silver). sovereigns are gods representatives on earth and individuals have a debt to society, taxes emerge, fines and penalties, money and exchange.

even the english word "to pay" is originally derived from a word for "to pacify, appease"

peace means paying what you owe. and there is such a thing as hurting others so is debt essential? where does forgiveness come into this?

cattle as currency, particularly in ireland. also bondmaids ie slaves. people (especially women) and animals as property, and the property by which all other property should be measured. creeps.

exchange implies equality. in dealing with cosmic forces, this was simply assumed to be impossible from the start.

does the death of god lead to more exploitation from godlike humans? we are all humans and equal therefore is is concievable that you could owe me something repayable. so pay your debts, they are real and valid. forgiveness can be ignored, we are not gods.

the sumerian word amargi, the first recorded word for "freedom" in any known human language, literally means "return to mother"

melt the gold, materia prima, blah blah blah etc.

the only way of getting oneself from the debt [in the brahmanas, to the cosmos, ancestors, humanity] was not literally repaying debts, but rather showing that these debts do not exist because one is not in fact separate to begin with, and hence that the very notion of cancelling the debt and and achieving a separate, autonomous existence was ridiculous from the start.

in any real life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. no one is more real than any other. the real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity and therefore, make the basis of our civilisation.

what about accepting the contradiction as a basis for civilization? that we are all loving greedy calculating caring irrational passionless vulnerable uninterested scared ambitious broken beings. what society does this allow.

Caps Lock, Ruben Pater

A bill for the rental of a boat, the sale of an oxen, a receipt for beer. The oldest messages ever found are not diaries or love poems but financial records.

Can we change this through sabotage and resistance at the point of content? eg i refuse to make this ad apolitical, i demand to express my love instead of writing your crappy tagline again. maybe it needs to be more subtle and subversive to get away with it.

Economy is a system where value is exchanged based on trust, and for thousands of years scribes were responsible for creating trustworthy documents that guaranteed authenticity and authority in large societies.

Creating or generating trust through labour. This job can mostly now be done by machines in a lot of situations, is it an essentially wrong thing to do though. The people with the most time available to commit to trust should have it, or those who can buy the most time of others and machines.

Seth Siegelaub. Communication and class struggle, 1979 Johanna Drucker, Graphesis, 2014 Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 2014

What happens if you commission OSP to design banknotes or passports?

Destroying [financial] records is a revolutionary act

but also forging, faking and editing them. 1867 ticker tape is invented and used for stock quotes.

the first newspapers were the correspondence between investors sharing shipping and trade information.

If so many of these media were invented for commerce, property management, military uses, is it good to repurpose them for our own needs? what would a medium created for other purposes look like? media for love, community or respect fpr example.

gapminder.org/dollar-street

with the advent of virtual money taking over physical money, the role of the scribe is outsourced to automated technology. transactions are digitally stored and inscribed, only indirectly visible through online or offline balance sheets

is this a place we could communicate other more important things? can i tell you i love you in a bank transaction? do i want to?

Designer as Engineer

differences in land measurements stood in the way of a new national tax code. States depended on food supply, which required data on how much farm land there was. anthropologist James c Scott emphasises in "seeing like a state" (1997) that local measurement practices were culturally rich and social, but not 'legible' for the state, and therefore need to be standardized. 

the idea of legibility at different structural scales and from different viewpoints is interesting, as well as this legibility being forced on others. are professional terms legible to amateurs, do they help divide and exclude? is there a way these professional terms can be translated or opened to break this separation? do discipline specific practices prevent connection, can these be adapted or maybe fused to connect better? are there convertors that can go between people just like we have for cables? what happens when you glue a drumstick to a paintbrush? or a wacom pen to a dance shoe? an aerial hoop to a synthesiser? silks woven through guitar strings? bells in your hair? a pantograph that connects the pianists fingers to the dancers feet.

DIN paper stand at a fair in Leipzig, Germany 1932. the signs read 'Normformate helfen verkaufen' (Norm formats help selling) and 'Normung bringt Ordnung' (norms bring order).

(figure caption, p.81). is it possible to have order with variation? does variety and change have to mean chaos? what is with the fear of the unknown and the other and difference? it's going to be ok. your eyes are open, look where you are going, its not as dangerous as they say. we're on an adventure. I'm not sure you'll enjoy it as much of you keep worrying like this.

the DIN (deutsches institut für normung) system was initiatied in 1917 by the manufacturers for artillery to streamline the war industry during World War One. out of the many DIN industry standards still in use today, the best-known are the paper formats which were adopted as a world standard in 1975. today the a-formats are the most used paper size system in the world.

Also the DIN 1451 typefaces.

cathy o neil weapons of math destruction

graphesis, johanna drucker

perhaps the boringness of administrative design is the entire point, the consequence of a visual strategy. an invisibility that hides the violence behind every bureaucracy.

this "perhaps" sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory. is there any evidence that this is a visual strategy? i do recall seeing some strategy documents in a design studio in Ireland when water fees were being introduced. certainly they were intended to manipulate how people viewed their own rights (something along the lines of we need to teach people to value water, then we can teach them to pay for it). these documents are usually difficult to access and lost in the political/commercial bureaucracy. are there design whistleblowers? are designers aware that they have a whistle worth blowing? even more importantly than government strategies, designers are often offered a seat at the table deep inside corporate decision making boardrooms. the designer as spy, the designer as saboteur. we have all of these artists with deep desires to fuck all this, sleeper cells waiting for a signal. so yes there is evidence i have seen it and i suspect you have too.

the lack of intelligence we associate with bureaucracy serves its underlying violence.

duh. but mindlessness is a symptom that affects real humans, and is the reason the source of the problems is hard to find. were all just doing our job.

bureaucracy is the result of a scaling of societies. when communities become too large for verbal communication and social bonds such as trust and kinship to work, graphic symbols, typography and official documents replace the vernacular order by a bureaucratic order.

this sounds more like a report of what has happened rather than a law of nature. are symbols and documents the only way to hold a bigger society together. for example the role of charismatic leaders, through history but especially in the era of television. a different kind of symbolism and structure.

the question is how large scale relations of trust can be socially sensitive, without reverting to bureaucratic systems of oppression.

education, voice, responsibility, respect. these are obviously not purely technological concerns but technology (how it is created by people, how it is used by people) should certainly do what it can to help.

Johanna Drucker suggests that the the invention of optical instruments such as the microscope by the end of the sixteenth century helped to further the conception that science could be visual, from the scientific method of observation.

how will the electron microscope affect sciences views? already the theories have changed to accept that observation has an effect on the world. hopefully more honest, less detached, intimate science and caring science.

René Descartes invented the x,y,z coordinate system and the rational grid in the seventeenth century.

René as dreamer, René as mystic. Grids and magic squares and circles have been used for a long time before science, capitalism and other modern hegemonic structures have utilised them. Designer as shaman, potter, or sacred smith. Someone who embues objects with power.

William Playfair, Charles Joseph Minard, JH Lambert.

Roman land surveyors even created a special grid called centuriation which 'turned all Europe into one vast sheet of graph paper'

inner quote from Samuel Edgerton quoted via David Turnbull, 'maps are territories: science is an atlas: a portfolio of exhibits' p.26. is referencing a type of cadastral mapping for intellectual property? Rubes felt the need to mention Sam in the text, but Dave only gets mentioned in the endnotes. the referencing system (harvard in this case, i think?) gives a structure to the chains of ownership, and as with geographical property allows for 'taxation and to solve disputes'. well maybe not direct taxation but certainly there are financial motivations involved. is refusing to reference a valid act of protest, like tearing down fences around the commons? printing books illegally?

centuriation is super interesting. in latin centuriatio or, more usually, limitatio. it was used to privatise the ager publicus of the po valley, some of the earliest roman colonies. it was used both to create towns and military camps.

the ager centuriatus system.

The surveyor first identified a central viewpoint, the umbilicus agri or umbilicus soli. He then took up his position there and, looking towards the west, defined the territory with the following names:

ultra, the land he saw in front of him;
citra, the land behind him;
dextera, the land to his right;
sinistra, the land to his left.
He then traced the grid using an instrument known as a groma, tracing two road axes perpendicular to each other:

the first, generally oriented east–west, was called decumanus maximus, which was traced taking as reference the place where the sun rose in order to know exactly where east was;[7]
the second, with a north–south orientation, was called cardo maximus.

van wigipedia. the groma is the surveying tool with four plumb lines. this is also the name given to the intersection of the decumanus and the cardo, so really the tool and surveying are at the centre of the civilising/colonising/militarising process. mapping and naming and conquering. other tools included the chorobates and dioptra. the surverors were called gromatici: the practitioners are defined by their tools. similar to how modern professions can be called 'programmer', 'trumpet player', 'cashier', 'fork lift driver', 'binman'. see also in the united states Public Land Survey System (PLSS).

NOITU LOVER T. LOVER

Immanuel kant categorised different races according to assumed moral and physical standards, which scientifically anchored slavery as a morally just act.

kant even

Iconoclasistas, 'to whom belongs the land?' nativeland.ca. collective mapping processes. "conflicting and overlapping areas occur regularly and show mapping is also an act of collective world-making"

by creating categories, standards, and documents, the designer as engineer serves as an extension of the bureaucracy by which the nation state and market economies are governed... problems occur when the messy reality of human society is forced to confirm to categories and standards that only serve the needs of a few. the point is that scientific thinking and rational ordering in society are necessary, as long as they don't forcefully dominate and suppress other perspectives.

the text also mentions soviet and chinese socialism as examples of science and rationalism bad.

a socially aware graphic design should be able to look beyond industrial presets, and towards created shared social spaces of creativity and knowledge, accessible to everyone.

assuming creating and knowing are good goals, this sentence is a bit too vague. its easy to say industry is bad when its compared to something so undefined. "accessible to everyone" similarly, at what cost is this worth achieving?

digital technology has given designers more control over the production process.

this was a good chapter but the conclusions are not so great. is the above even true?

by starting small, in your own social circle and region, economies of reciprocity can create sociale sensitive practices like the common lands did before capitalism

abuse of the idea of the commons maybe, but generally sounds good im up for it. also what is a social circle. and where are its boundaries and why should we stay within them. is staying within leaving others without.

The Designer as Brander

the branding of slaves was part of a designed cultural system of oppression and violence... the Dutch West India Company was one of the first corporations in the world, and already had 'brand' guidelines... branding reveals the violent logic of capitalism's exploitation of people and planet, by turning everything into a commodity, even people.

is identity possible without branding? how to reveal who you are without ’making your mark', through culture, practice, methodology. can a designer (the word seems inappropriate here) help reveal identity in these ways rather than claim it through property. "we are us because we do this". it is about storytelling and myth making of course, and making space for these practices to exist. ritual that explore, affirm and celebrate.

the successful use of fiction to breathe life into products taught early advertising professionals that they could sell anything by appealing to the customers subconscious. branding started to revolve around the creation of pleasant associations.

the use of fiction in itself isn't an evil method though i think? it can hide motivations and purposes though, from the person the fiction is used on. is it immoral to appeal to the subconscious? Life without subconscious sounds pretty boring tbh.

No Logo, Naomi Klein

copywriter Helen Woodward started her advertising career in 1907 and said: 'if you are advertising any product, never see the factory in which it was made.... don't watch the people at work... because, you see, when you know the truth about anything, the real inner truth—it is very hard to write the surface fluff which sells it.'

inner truth, chung fu, wind over lake. i am sitting with the kralingse bos behind me, the lake in front of me, and the wind blowing through me. the cardo runs from dextera (a woman jogging with her dog) to sinestra (two windmills and the sound of a hedge strimmer). there is no road ahead only the lake. undefinable water. my eyes are open. i see a beach on the other side. it is sunny and the wind is gentle. it whips up the surface of the lake but it has a surface no less. a skin. a protective organ as membrane. a tension which can be broken, but also has strength. not unbreakable but certainly there. the wind does not blow through me that was a lie. it blows against and around my skin.

i spent (pun intended) at least a few months working in an industry that i do not support in order to fund being able to come here and study. real estate, venture pharma, advertising. i am not sure on the morality of this choice. if, as i had partly planned, i ended up in a more traditional design-as-commodity educational setting, the me that exists now would see both the preparation and the education as at least a wee bit abhorrent. obviously the me that exists now would not exist in that situation. but i hope now i am in a position to pay some indulgences for what I've done. in this preparation and at other points in my career. i see the industry i was involved in at points to be extractive, manipulative and dangerously blinkered. as well as causing less damage, i would like to reduce the damage of others in a similar position. am i trying to become an evangelist of some sort? maybe. so i think others are wrong? yes, or at least blind to the harm they are causing.

is a graphic designer just an artist who works for corporations and businesses?

world war ii had left Europe in ruins, but the us economy was still intact, and capitalism had come out victoriously.

no citation given. did capitalism tactically come out of wwii victoriously? how so? it is often depicted as a series of battles between states and groups of states.

while designers compared logotypes, activists put the spotlights on corporations, revealing financial malpractice, labour exploitation, tax evasion, and the extraction of resources.

ok ive got a new tagline for your company: "we dont exploit anyone and our profit is distributed according to the work put in by everyone involved. also we actively fight against discrimination and destruction of the planet, while ensuring our work practices do not further this behaviour." it doesnt have to be true yet just start by saying it, invite critisism, try to be better.

Super sad true love story, gary shteyngart

brand personalities were to fill the void of the absent craftsmen. now those working for the brands have to hide their personality, in favour of adopting the artificial personality of the corporation.

i think this is something that many people know to be true, but is it documented or recorded in any way? it is embarrassing for brands so difficult to research this. but could be done im sure, even through surveys and anonymous interviews.

Place branding was introduced by marketeer Philip Kotler in the early 1990s... cities in the global North had grown because of manufacturing jobs, but now that manufacturing was being moved to low-wage countries they faced high unemployment.

Branding cities went hand in hand with gentrification... the Bible of city branding is 'the rise of the creative class' by Richard Florida in which he proposes that cities should focus on attracting creatives... his work was the foundation for policies of gentrification and city branding since the 2000s.

this is a very tidy story. not that that makes it untrue but it feels like a single thread in a much larger second hand sweater.

the process of enclosure of the commons in society, where shared spaces available to everyone that aren't privately owned are seized and sold off, from healthcare, to hosting, to nature, often happens through branding.

get your filthy hands off my Häagen Dazs. brands as flags demarking territory. designer as surveyor: we will build a road here from east to west, and here another from north to south. a city, a military camp, invasive, colonial. road building as an action which territorialises, the earth is now a map, centuriated.

there is an urban legend that people who live in cities recognise more logos than bird species.

but just because we recognise them doesn't mean we have any desire for them. i click on the twitter "X" to try to escape, it brings me back to the lobby, back to the feedtrough. surely there must be a way out, a bigger window with a bigger x to press. maybe the only option is to switch off the power; yes it's a power issue. have you tried– back on, migrate south for winter, back up, coriolis, spinning not as a movement in itself but as a frame of reference, an acknowledgement or acceptance of the ground shifting beneath our feet. an awareness to prevent dizziness. and somewhere outside birdsong, dawn again.

Designer as Salesperson

the salesperson becomes an expert in making people feel certain emotions, or associations with a product, purely by appealling to their inner desires.

Is the wrong part the misplaced appeal, that your desires have been tricked? Presented with an object that is designed to seem to satisfy the lack. But the lack isn't going away anyway, is it inherently worse that these objects are designed to fill this purpose? I think so but would struggle to explain why. It's predatory, it's taking advantage of human nature, it's betrayal.

Anne McClintock shows how advertisements played a role in spreading racist ideas to a wider audience through what she calls 'commodity racism'.

In her 1995 book Imperial Leather. Advertisement (and all communication) as a carrier for ideas, not only the intended message is the communicator but all sorts of other noise, signals, inferred meanings, esoteric layers.

if we continue to allow business to replace civil society, advertising will replace cultural functions normally ascribed to writers, musicians and artists.

Thomas Frank, historian

What is advertising as opposed to writing, musicking and arting? What is a historian, surely a sort of writer and advertiser, if not maybe artist or musician too? The categories can maybe me escaped by melting them down into a delicious fudge and using it to make a birthday cake for an elderly neighbour. Call over to their house and spend some time with them. Ask them about their life, tell them about yours. Laugh together, smile.

Finding 'cool' has become equivalent of knowing what young people like, so advertisers go out of their way to scout upcoming and existing subcultures and appropriate their novel styles and ideas to sell products. Culture, even if created collectively, can be enclosed by capitalism and used for profit.

Should youth culture be protected from appropriation? Is this necessary or possible? What is the damage caused by this kind of appropriation?

Creative destruction is the continuous capitalist process of destroying old structures, to make room for new, more profitable ones.

in graphic design or advertising... when a typeface, a colour, a style, or a concept has been worn out in the market, it has to be replaced with one that contradicts, responds, or mocks the previous one and thus creates value for products that appear different but offer no new use value.

Using established canonical design strategies, Helvetica, as an act of protest? Kinda lame protest though. Refusing to make anything new? Not great either.

no type of communication is so present as advertising, in all parts of society.

I strongly disagree based on no evidence, but rube gives no evidence either. Right now I cas see my own notes, the ux of my phone generally as well as my notes app and keyboard, the book, a falafel wrapper. Only one of these, the wrapper, i would consider to have advertising as the primary function. I spend so much of my day communicating with friends and family, discussing events, other people, our plans and experiences, emotions and thoughts. I see signposts. I listen to music. I see people's clothes. I read recipes. Call a doctor. Book a taxi. Some people watch movies for three hours straight, I can't imagine anyone paying that much attention to an advertisement.

so even though the shoe went through the hands of many people, the traces of the people who made them remain invisible. The list cognitive and creative potential of the worker is what [Marx] calls a 'fetishist' quality which is 'transferred' to products, when we start to believe that humanity's collective production power only consists of products.

What are you suggesting to produce apart from products? What other production power do you claim to have? Just at the level of words this isn't working for me. Although as an author RP I suppose should be allowed to set the working conditions of his words. Or should they be autonomous? Governed by their own laws. Nomos as an act of assigning, allotting, taking. Autonomy is dividing property yourself or yourselves. Tools are products that make more products. Whose tools? Who made them, how long did it take, was it difficult, what were their working conditions? Who uses them, and all the same questions?

I'm also not entirely sure about the fetishistic stuff. Yes we all get turned on by shoes (the paragraph also mentions laces, leather, rubber) so I suspect the example is a bit loaded. Transferral of desire to objects, yes of course this happens. What about coffee. Maybe I want coffee not as a substitute or means to achieve sexy-rich-famous life but just because I'm tired and I'm addicted and it smells great. Even crappy mass produced exploitative coffee. I am more likely to fetishize the artisan roastery coffee than roodmark snelfilter. The craftsmanship also transfers magic of some sort into the product, this is maybe just part of human creation rather than inherent to industrial production, although I appreciate it has a particular character.

the handmade shoe was valuable because the buyer was in direct contact with the producer and seller.

The shoe is valuable because it protects the foot, the shoe is valuable because it fits, it looks good, it's comfortable, it's long lasting.

the interpretation of culture, Clifford geertz

The title alone has some pretty heavy words that I will perform some exegesis on.

interpretation

According to Clifford Geertz, "[b]elieving, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning".[1] In theory, symbolic anthropology assumes that culture lies within the basis of the individuals’ interpretation of their surrounding environment, and that it does not in fact exist beyond the individuals themselves.

What does interpret mean? Also who puts a square bracket around a single letter that's insane. Loosen up papi.

I'm not sure if the individual needs to be taken fundamentally as the unit or level of interpretation. This should also make space for both subcultures (supercultures?) as thinking acting meaning-making entities as well as cognitive dissonance and vague confused or itrational concepts and opinions within supposedly in-dividuals.

can you sing to this harmony?
Can you let a quartet set you free?

This tonality doesn't disagree
Ought to be chromatically pleasing me

Skiptracing, mild high club

Maybe symbolic anthropology at the level of individual instance of a symbol. Its position within a word. It's rendering as a glyph or letterform, it's other material properties such as media involved. Is it on a page. Is it a dancemove. Why not. Who said that? What the? What the fuck? What the fuck is going on?

Interpreting is a translational activity in which one produces a first and final target-language output on the basis of a one-time exposure to an expression in a source language.

The most common two modes of interpreting are simultaneous interpreting, which is done at the time of the exposure to the source language, and consecutive interpreting, which is done at breaks to this exposure.

Interpreting is an ancient human activity which predates the invention of writing.[1] However, the origins of the profession of interpreting date back to less than a century ago.[when?][2]

How simultaneous can interpreting get? How consecutive? In the context of interpreting symbols that are being thrown around right now.

What do you mean writing malakas? Writing was given to us by Thoth. The messenger. A message is always an interpretation, there is no distinction. Readwriteinterprettranslate.

An interpretation is an assignment of meaning to the symbols of a formal language.

But in most languages the symbols are so full of meaning already, this is why I want to de-sign. Assign other meanings, take some meanings away, generally fuck with them a little and see what happens. Consign. Resign. Co-sign. @. Ok sign.

from inter "between" (see inter-) + second element probably from PIE *per- (5) "to traffic in, sell." Related: Interpreted; interpreting.

Again with the commercial roots. The proto-indo-europeans really had a society much more deeply embedded in capitalism than we do now, it must have been very difficult for them to imagine other realities.

*per- (5)
Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to traffic in, to sell," an extended sense from root *per- (1) "forward, through" via the notion of "to hand over" or "distribute."

It forms all or part of: appraise; appreciate; depreciate; interpret; praise; precious; price; pornography.

It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Sanskrit aprata "without recompense, gratuitously;" Greek porne "prostitute," originally "bought, purchased," pernanai "to sell;" Latin pretium "reward, prize, value, worth;" Lithuanian perku "I buy."

What are you selling? Or aprata what are you giving?

How to get beyond translation? Do I want to? How to break objects beyond the ability to translate, acknowledge what is lost? Some things can never be sold, some things are beyond capital and they are safe there. We are safe here. Is there also something between but outside our interpretations, something public that is also outside language?

The per- as in hand over or distribute meaning seems to fit much better with the modern sense of interpret, how do we know it doesn't come from this sense? Oh yeah because economy defines life I keep forgetting, getting distracted by my feelings silly me.

Related words: appraise; appreciate; praise; precious; price; pornography.

culture

Culture is about giving and taking, if you believe in capital. If you believe in value. If you have any values. Luckily in this cult we don't believe in good and evil. We worship the christmother. Chrisma. How can we trade if we are one. What can you ever owe to to the uni-verse, the whole idea is nonsense. And yet we have to acknowledge the existence of both oil and water. As well as wine.

Culture as in yogurt. Culture as in low. Culture as in agar or broth. Bacterial, yeasty, fungal. I want to ferment inside of you. I want you to turn me from water into wine. Growing, evolving, organoleptically it's all getting a bit better. More sensual, more sensuous. And hopefully at the same time more sensitive, yes I think so, it's part of acknowledging bodies and organs and tissues, acknowledging lifeforms and forms of living. Together.

Contents

There are two prefaces I probably won't read them. There are five other parts, the first one has just one chapter which is the thick description bit I'm looking for. Deep play is the last chapter in the book which is nice I've already read it. Sometimes contents pages are calming, they reveal the structure of the book. There is a rational approach that through its clarity, simplification and order gives me less work to do as a reader. It is a story that guides me through the narrative.

Preface to the 2000 edition

This is the first of two prefaces in my version of this book. It explains that most the chapters on the contents page are specific or cases. This is great because now I don't have to read them.

first you write and then you figure out what you are writing about.

taste but time love me soul coffee space aah fear work meaning party passion care waste sex musick the sky fire bread with cheese windburn eye contact itching yawn butterflies spaceblanket conspiracy surf text betweenness.

we do not start of with well formed ideas... We in fact look into [some general notions] and after doing so we return to sort through our notes and memories, both of them defective, to see what we might have uncovered that clarifies anything or leads on to useful revisions of received ideas... The writing this produces is accordingly exploratory, self-questioning, and shaped more by the occasions of its production than its post hoc organisation into chaptered books and thematic monographs might suggest.

What is the benefit of fighting to keep it amorphous? Honesty and transparency about the source material. Skipping the step where the ideas are formed post hoc, leaving it to the reader to carry out this step. Without a chapter outline where is your idea, where is the thesis?

without it we are left with an assortment of vignettes and aperçus, fragments in search of a whole

Sounds ideal.

So my initial reaction to the contents page and this preface was that they drove me away from the thick content of the book. Would the book be better served without them, with a flatter or less organised hierarchy? But in that case I don't think I would have gotten this overview and the experience of zooming in that has happened from the title to here. In the end it is up to the reader to find meaning, and not totally dependant on the authors/editors/designers.

despite my initial uncertainties, the book is a book, the chapters are chapters, and the whole has a certain informing rhythm.

Structure as informing rhythm. In what way is rhythm informative, how does it tell us things? Through a feeling and a movement, through sound and repetition. Information is novelty, what is the relationship of novelty to repetition? Laminar and turbulent rhythms as ways of informing through movement.

Preface

to try to find the figure in the carpet of one's writings can be as filling as trying to find out in one's life; to weave, post facto, a figure in—"this is what I meant to say"—is an intense temptation.

I like the quote within em dashes. Like the authors voice comes through so clearly and honestly, full of intention and clarity: "this is what I meant to say". It doesn't matter why he couldn't say it before, it doesn't matter about the other things he said or says, listen—"this is what I meant to say"—and we can communicate with eachother.

an attempt...to say what I have been saying

Apart from the quote between the dashes or is hard to see beneath the surface of these few pages. They seem a little afraid, unconfident compared to the 2000 prefix. There is some confusion or self doubt. Even the quote between the dashes is so self reflexive as a sentence, the author seems aware of his intentions but unable to summarise them the way he feels he is obliged to in this situation. The cultural structure of the book, the contents page, the preface(s), the introductory chapter, they are not the work, they are not what he meant to say and they are not what he said. He tries to excuse his revisions and explain why he would rather not have said them, he is wishing for a confidence in what was done.

The Utoplia of Rules, David Graeber

3: The Utopia of Rules, or why we really love bureaucracy after all

II: Rationalism as a Form of Spirituality

Our very conception of rationality is strangely incoherent

Re 10.11.1619

public servants... it is the responsibility of servants to do their master's bidding... insofar as their master is something called "the public", however, this creates certain problems: how to figure out what, exactly, the public really wants them to do.

<ppre>pretty much anyone with a utopian vision... dreams of creating a social orderthat will, unlike current arrangements, make some sort of coherent sense-and which will, therefore, represent the triumph of reason over chaos.

What does it mean to not allow reason to triumph? It is not the same as fully succumbing to the chaotic. And the accepting of democratic drive is not the same as the rejection of reason, it is simply putting it on a different scale. This body politic determines this action as correct, as opposed to this specialist or regent. It is just a matter of authority, reason is being appealed to in all cases?

a human being without emotions would not be able to think at all

And a reference is given to oh no hang on a second, the footnote just says "There is a reason Mr. Spock was a fictional character. But of course Spock wasn't really supposed to be emotionless, he just pretended to be, so ina way he represented the ideal of rationality perfectly. I feel a little cheated by this footnote but also its super funny. I feel nerdsniped. Five of the fifteen footnotes on this page refer to other texts. You are confusing me Dave thank you.

In the next few paragraphs he makes some extreme statements that when people claim to be rational they are implying everyone else is irrational, but its not so binary and the argument is a bit weak. People usually claim to be more rational, not exclusively rational.

you cant really make an argument against rationality, because for that argument to be convincing, it would itself have to be framed in rational terms.

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and just feel no this isnt it?

pythagoreans... music of the spheres... when the human mind (or soul) exercised its powers of reason, it was simply participating in that larger rational order, the cosmic "world soul" that animated all.

Maybe it feels right because it is right.

The Pythagoreans, like most greek philosophers, had been avid participants in the political life of the city, which they often sought to reconstitute on rational grounds. Under the Roman Empire, this was impossible. All political questions were now settled. A single-and apparently eternal-legal and bureaucratic order regulated public affairs; instead of aspiring to change this structure, intellectuals increasingly embraced outright mysticism, aspiring to find new ways to transcend earthly systems entirely.

Spiritual logic or rationality as escapism, but can escapism also be a way of creating alternative imaginaries? Maybe there is a reason we are trying to escape. Spin faster.

Most of us accept as self-evident truth, that what sets humans apart from other animals is rationality

Poor lil spiders. B ut then dave goes on to say that humans have other faculties that are in fact unique, like imagination. I dont understand why so many humans argue that humans are so amazing.

The Great Chain of Being

I dont know if this hierarchy essentially strikes me as problematic in the same way as Aglaia has highlighted it with an exclamation mark. Although I do see issues with it, I've been influenced by Douglas Hofstaedters idea that there are "big souls" and "little souls". If I had to pull the lever in a trolley problem of a human vs a mosquito, yes I would save the human. It's more complicated than a linear spectrum but there is some order or system for sure.

Marsilio Ficino

Oh the fun stuff nice. But again yes there is a cause for some hierarchy or "value free ethics" but obviously these ideas lead to extremely dangerous beliefs and actions too which I'm not trying to say are right. I just wonder where is the grey area between swatting a mosquito and genocide. which both find themselves on this very broad scale.

The appeal to rationality in Descartes and his successors remains a fundamentally spiritual, even mystical, commitment, that the mathematical or math-like abstractions that are assumed to be the essence of thought, are also the ordering principles othat regulate nature.

the relation between reason, imagination and desire

Not explained here, but where? Can it be explained?

Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight, Clifford Geertz

Republished in Daedelus, Fall 2005. Originally published in the same journal, Winter 1972.

trapped … look … probing feel … vaguely disembodied … "away" … you are real … bemused … expose … secluded … secrecy … without attracting attention … the superorganism came instantly apart as its components scattered in all directions … everything was dust and panic … northward … looking for … found … seeing … double take … an impassioned description … barely communicated … looking … in the eye … to study culture … to tell … we had not seen … bewildered … no longer invisible … attention … interest … knew … small detail by small detail … only watching … mimicked … the underworld … called … ask us … extraordinariness … accepted … we were quite literally "in." … opened up … informants … caught, or almost caught … rapport … acceptance … penetrate … immediate, inside-view … subjects … emotional explosion, status war, and philosophical drama … inner nature I desired to understand.

There is definitely observation happening in this first section which is good, also awareness of observation from the villagers, the anthropologists and the police towards eachother. Some acceptance on the part of the anthropologists of the effect their presence has on the situation. Although I would like to see this examined in more detail later in the essay.

a well-studied place … microscopically examined … a few passing remarks … noticed … a popular obsession … a revelation … phenomena … surfaces … apparently … actually … deep psychological identification … men with their cocks … conception … the body as a set of separately animated parts … self-operating penises … ambulant genitals … masculine symbols … the language of everyday moralism … 'sabung' the word for cock … appears in inscriptions … to mean … behavious presumes … compared to … likened to … compared to … a good impression … perceived … the intimacy of men with their cocks … gazing at them with a mixture of rapt admiration and dreamy self-absorption … abstract sensuality … get a feel for … high-walled enclosures where the people live … wicker cages … far more care than it is when mere humans are going to eat it … inspected for flaws … squinted concentration of a diamond merchant … "I am cock crazy" … afficianado … "We're all cock crazy" … less visible dimensions … expressions … animality … demons … scripture, dance, ritual, myth … The Powers of Darkness … a blood sacrifice … The Day of Silence … to avoid … the creative power of aroused masculinity and the destructive power of loosened animality fuse in a bloody drama of hatred, cruelty, violence, and death … social embarrassment, moral satisfaction, aesthetic disgust, and cannibal joy.

I was hoping this thick description to be a bit less lyrical, I'm a little disappointed. It is dramatic and drawing big conclusions and I wonder if these conclusions are realistic in any sense of how it is experienced by those more accustomed to the cockfights than a visiting anthropologist. A very big narrative seems to be created in the mind of Cliff and I'm not sure it's basis is very solid. If he were more accepting or up front of this as his own interpretation of culture, in a consistent way I think it would be helpful. Even for example using the first person voice.

seek to find … obsessively deliberate … the lore … sharpened only at eclipses and the dark of the moon … animal fury so pure, so absolute, and in its own way so beautiful, as to be almost abstract, a Platonic concept of hate … to show … demonstrates … he blows in its mouth, putting the whole chicken head in his own mouth and sucking and blowing … make the dead walk … moving their bodies in kinesthetic sympathy with the movement of the animals … turnings of the head … it is said that spectators sometimes lose eyes … being too attentive … they glance off toward another … palm-leaf manuscripts … I have never seen … judgement … nor have I ever heard … decides … a judge, a king, a priest, and a policeman … I saw … I never once saw … I never saw … searching for … something not vertebrate enough to be called a group and not structureless enough to be called a crowd … a "focused gathering" … a set of persons engrossed in a common flow of activity and relating to one another in terms of that flow … they take their form from the situation that evokes them … the focus … duty of citizenship; taxation of fights … the connection between the excitements of collective life and those of blood sport … to expose it … the gambling.

Ok here I'm getting a bit more into his method. More first person descriptions. Relations of individual emotions values and actions with those of others, the group, and bigger social structures. Examination of the crowd present at the event itself and attempts to describe without defining the group dynamics and behaviours. Descriptions of the roles of participants (the umpire, the owner, the man who attaches the spurs); what they do, their beliefs and values, how they are viewed by others in society generally and in specific situations.

do … do … is … there are … there is … there is … is typically … typically … is … is … as we shall see most revealingly … 'is always' … 'without exception' … 'equally without exception' … 'is never' … what is … is … is … official … a webwork of rules … is made … overseer and public witness … as I say … to show … I have exxact and reliable data … the range … a mean … the distribution … trimodal … percent … percent … percent … the extremes … the normal … the average … if he shouts … if he shouts … indicates … crying out … they unlock gazes and the search goes on … men crying … finding themselves … clearly … the general pattern … nonexistent pole … the overwhelming majority … almost frenzied proportions … to find … the sense that sheer chaos is about to break loose … an effect … an iron rule … reported … critical analytical problem … a theory which sees … suggests … solving … demonstrating … the point that needs to be made … simple considerations of rationality suggest … care is taken … less advantageous angle … more care … genuinely … consciously … approximately equal … what statistics I have … the favourite … the underdog … ratio … the ratios … take the extremes … the ratio … from this proposition … two things more or less immediately follow … the logic … in fact … therefore … that this is the case is apparent from mere inspection, from the Balinese's own analysis of the matter, and from what more systematic observations I was able to collect … difficulty of making precise and complete recordings … a quite pronounced minimax saddle … in detail, the fit is not, of course, exact … the general pattern is quite consistent … directly proportional … directly proportional … volume … more is at stake … the paradox … merely apparent … formally incongruent … not really contradictory … the "center of gravity" … "makes the game" … defines it … signals … "depth" … "deep" … most painters, poets, and playwrights are mediocre … a means, a device … "interesting", "deep" matches … out of the realm of formal concerns into more broadly sociological and socio-psychological ones, and to a less purely economic idea of what "depth" in gaming amounts to.

I think a measurement of this technique's efficacy might be: Does this describe in enough detail that I feel confident to recreate the event accurately? This section started off with a lot of "is" and "does" statements, and proceeded to a more romantic description of the fight, and then to a statistical analysis of the betting. I like this mix, but I wonder would it be useful to emphasise the method or methods of enquiry being used at any one point to draw attention to why that method is being used. Maybe that's not necessary though dunno.

Bentham's concept of "deep play" … by it he means play in which the stakes are so high that it is, from his utilitarian standpoint, irrational for men to engage in it at all … they are both in over their heads … immoral from first principles … men are irrational - addicts, fetishists, children, fools, savages … the explanation … moral import … utility and disutility … unexpanded sense … pleasure and pain … happiness and unhappiness … esteem, honor, dignity, respect … affirmed or insulted … watching … appraisive drama is deep … a conclusion would be absurd … risks … very publicly … to lay one's public self, allusively and metaphorically, throught the medium of one's cock, on the line … meaningfulness … follow Weber rather than Bentham … imposition of meaning on life is the major end and primary condition of human existence … access of significance … what the sport is all about … the point of it all … regarded … wuite general … a sociomoral hierarchy … the extremely poor, the socially despised, the personally idiosyncratic … ashamed … status … the really substantial members of the community, the solid citizenry … these men generally dominate and define … an 'affaire d'honneur' … what makes Balinese cockfighting deep is … the migration of the Balinese status hierarchy into the body of the cockfight … the idea/demonic rather narcissistic, male self … animal mirrors of psychic form … a simulation of the social matrix … crosscutting, overlapping, highly corporate groups - villages, kingroups, irrigation societies, temple congregations, "castes" … the necessity to affirm it, defend it, celebrate it, justify it and just plain bask in it … " a status bloodbath" … to make this clear … to demonstrate it … my statistical data … intricately organised, a labyrinth of alliances and oppositions … we may concentrate on [patriarchal kingroups and village units] in a part-for-whole way, without undue distortion … as explained … the exact situation is thus … the general pattern … as support of the general thesis … a dramatisation of status concerns … the following facts … facts … concrete evidence-examples … statements and numbers … 1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5 … 6 … 7 … 8 … 9 … 10 … 11 … 12 … 13 … 14 … 15 … 16 … 17 … you must pretend not to notice what he is doing … he tends to wander off for a cup of coffee r something to avoid … like playing with fire only not getting burned … 1 … 2 … the deeper the match … 1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5 … The Cockfighter … status virtue, the arrogant, resolute, honor-mad player with real fire, the ksatria prince.

Further reading: The Sociology of Religion, Max Weber.

What I like about this section is that it is finally giving the impression that it is not the description that is thick, but the cultural practices it describes. The description feels real rather than attempting to find meaning that may or may not be there. It feels descriptive rather than creative. Of course it is also creative, but I find it believable. I really like when he starts to explain why humans make and do culture:

to affirm it, defend it, celebrate it, justify it and just plain bask in it

I find the labyrinth reference interesting in the context of the article coming from Daedelus. The journal's website says this:

Dædalus was founded in 1955 and established as a quarterly in 1958. The journal’s namesake was renowned in ancient Greece as an inventor, scientist, and unriddler of riddles. Its emblem, a maze seen from above, symbolizes the aspiration of its founders to “lift each of us above his cell in the labyrinth of learning in order that he may see the entire structure as if from above, where each separate part loses its comfortable separateness.”

This doesn't seem to align perfectly with what I think is Geertz's attempt to learn from within, no flying too close to the sun here, no attempt to even escape the labyrinth.

Modular Matter, Jian Haake

https://media.xpub.nl/2023/thesis/modular-matter-Jian_Haake.pdf

[modular matter's] experimental and modular setup may help to break open those long-established habits and lead to unexpected designs and meaningful printed outcome, for example in the form of small posters or even simple publications. Moreover, the counter approach of the tool hopefully sparks questions and critical conversations about the current status quo of this field, initiating essential reflections and re-imaginations of the creative practice and its tool ecologies

I am interested in doing this too but maybe not so much within the practice of ⊞ because I hate it and I want to destroy it. Not really so angry but I at least want to smash it and dissolve it. Jian talks about "translating" the operating modes of sonic modular synthesis to print publishing. The translation part itself I find really interesting as it seems to be the point of connection and a point where definitions can be easily broken.

Each module performs a certain operation

This is an important part of "modular" that I would like to extend. I remember a conversation with a person in a modular shop (in SchneidersLaden in Berlin maybe) where I said I wanted to get a compressor module. They explained that an amp module and some other small function modules would be a better idea. This blew my mind that modules could be even smaller and sharper than I expected. Is there a difference between the division of labour for machines and for humans, if so why? It is about not treating humans as modules that can be exploited. It is about letting a human be so much more than a task that they perform, a discipline they are trained in. It is about making a tool useful and productive. What happens if tools are modular but not small and sharp? Or humans? Is it possible for full and complex humans to still be open and modular? Where does a module end and a where does an instrument begin? Where does one instrument end and where does a band begin? Where is that sound coming from?

I need to add modular synth things to my reading list. Something from Dieter Döpfers https://doepfer.de/home_e.htm Something mmmm I have a list somewhere I dunno. read deverahi again. I more want things about the philosophy of modular in general.

Thinking about translating these modules (or the idea of them) to HPGL: some functions could be interesting at different points and thus stay modular. For example a module that adds header and footer data to SCale or ROtate the content coming into it. Pseudocode that I think makes sense in HPGL:

SC(new scaling factors)
    inputcode
SC(remove the scaling effect

RO(new scaling factors)
    inputcode
RO(remove the scaling effect

I 'thiiiiink' maybe these effects could be applied in different orders, repeatedly, at different points of the process, to get different results? Not sure. Would have to try it to find out. Added to the prototyping list. As in the module is a function in the programming sense of the word.

This comes with the risk of inaccessibility and could make the tool less approachable for some readers

I appreciate this concern. I also wonder how necessary it is, there are probably very particular people who would be interested in this in the first place. But it is very caring thanks Jian <3 Combining technical and personal modes of address appeals to me also, and maybe explanations of why such a tool exists but I think she is probably going to include these too. Oh yeah the next paragraph explains that, or more specifically that she will be explaining the tool's context.

I am trying to consciously reflect on my own tool ecologies.

yus me too.

I need to read more about specialization and disciplines.

Before the Digital Era, typesetting and composition used to be very hands-on, manual operations that were directly connected to the printing process. Nowadays, the act of making the book (and printed matter in general) is in large part digital.

What is lost in the transition from manual to digital labour? The palms, lifelines, the back of the hand, scale. no hands ten fingers. Where will this rabbithole go https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-10-fundamentals-of-re_b_9625926 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_imagery http://piano-jazz.blogspot.com/p/water-pianism.html I'll try to focus on Jian's pdf but this is distracting.

goes a bit strange

You want to get to a point where you're playing as a spectator, you're not the one pulling the string

From danthecomposer. One part of me wants to complete the original task but one part of me wants to follow the flow, it is conflicting.

By mental preparation, it is meant that one unlearns what is thought to be known and understood, recognising that any preconceived ideas about playing the piano, especially about what is considered ‘beginner’ level and ‘advanced’ level, are an illusion.

It may be said that in order to enjoy some fresh water, the glass must first be emptied of its former contents.

Change is mostly limited to those situations in which the brain is in the mood for it.

You only need a piano to hear the results of what has taken place in the mind

Not a lot of ability or responsability given to the tool in this theory. The more something is practiced, the more connections are changed.

You become a spectator.

This is presented as the end goal, kinda weird.

Yet, even without a complete set of pens, the sharpest chisel or the finest brush, in mind, the true writer always has a story to tell, the true sculptor a scene to carve and the true artist a landscape to paint.

mmmmmmm ateriality though. The role or potential role of motor imagery in imaginative practice. What if I start thinking (closely, motorically) about a practice I have. Then I imagine (still just thinking!) alternative things happening in that situation to the usual practice.

Think about the process of sending an email. Really think about it in detail. You take out your laptop and place it on the table. You hinge it open and the screen automatically switches on. You log in, or maybe you dont need to. You locate your browser or email client. Picture the button you press to create a new mail, if you press a button. Imagine moving your fingers across the trackpad to click it. Or pressing down on the keys for a keyboard shortcut. You type the subject of the email, "TRANSCEND". You move to the recipient input field, maybe by moving your fingers over the trackpad and clicking, maybe with a keyboard shortcut again. You are going to send it to your close friend, AIWASS, so you type his email address AIWASS@boleskine.co.uk. Your fingers seep through the keyboard and walls of the house. You enter the house from several directions, up through the floorboards, through the tab key, but primarily through the bow window to the north. There is a blind person playing guitar. There is a green fire above their head. You enter the fire and when you emerge you are the guitar and you are the tab key and you are the at-sign. You blink and forget. You press send. You close the laptop by physically shutting the lid.

This could maybe be used in less imaginative ways that are closer to reality as it seems, or reality as you want it to be. Actually maybe that is more rather than less imaginative, takes more work to stay closer to lived/perceived/actual experience in this case.

Ok back to Jian's thing

The actual materialization, the emergence of printed matter, is often not even part of the designer’s process.

This is an interesting point, and I wonder how it relates to my practice. Does it really have to print out onto paper? I like making things for print but I make things for screen at least as often. So the strange connections I'm making should maybe connect to screen as well, in the coming months. A lot of what I make is published to the web. Or becomes a music or theatre performance. Take existing inputs, functions and outputs, and pull all the wires out and make a new patch.

the conditions and implications that come with the  digital workflow and tools are often overlooked or even concealed

I would also like to reveal these conditions and implications. And in a Geertzian way see the potential

to affirm it, defend it, celebrate it, justify it and just plain bask in it

And also to question, destroy, highlight, protest against. Being entangled in corporate environments (hellscapes?) does not mean I have to be happy about it, or go quietly.

For reading list: Awkward gestures: designing with Free Software, Snelting.

Dependency on proprietary tools is not problematized enough in the creative field and can expedite instrumentalization and a lack of agency.

I'm not sure what she means by instrumentalisation in this context but I suspect it is related to my own concerns above about the tooling of practitioners.

They shape the world, which is why they must not be ignored nor underestimated, but rather be used and built with care and consciousness. 

<3

Do I want to make tools that are actually useful alternatives to the mainstream, or do I want to make art that looks like tools to highlight the issue?

Far too often efficiency and productivity are prioritized over creativity and out of the box thinking. Similar 

Why be creative? Why think outside the box?

the beauty and potential of the outskirts.

Oh yeah that's a great reason.

All design options are predefined by the applications, and even though they may seem to offer endless possibilities and combinations, in the end they shape and limit what is (im)possible. ☻

These interfaces have become so embedded in our conception of reality that we now have a crisis of the imagination, where it is difficult to even think of anything different.” (Howell and Pogorzhelskiy, no date)

Quoted by Haake from The Screenless Office website, Brendan Howell.

The possibilities of the tool are what is considered possible, and the tool’s limitations define the boundaries of what can be envisioned. 

Is the solution to this to have, or simply to imagine, other tools? Are there other solutions? Use the wrong tool? Hold it the wrong way? How can you hold InDesign the wrong way?

OSP references, to do talk to them more.

Matt Ratto ... envisions critical making as a combination of “two typically disconnected mode of engagement in the world”, namely critical thinking and making. 

Connecting.

For reading list: Matt Ratto, Ratto, M. and Hockema, S. (2009) ‘FLWR PWR: Tending the walled garden’, in Dekker, A. and Wolfsberger, A. (eds.) Walled Garden. Amsterdam: Virtueel Platform. Garnet Hertz. What is Critical Making?’, Current, 18 April 2016. Available at: https://current.ecuad.ca/what-is-critical-making

She presents three methods for escaping proprietary software as designers: hacking, floss alternatives, make your own tools.

However, it is not only possible, but sometimes even easier than expected to get used to other tools. 

Sometimes, but I think it's important to note that its hard too. And I will try to describe that honestly as I do it.

Alternative tools, with all their idiosyncrasies and characteristics, have the potential to produce and shape more relatable, unusual and interesting outcome.

Yes, this is not always why someone uses InDesign though.

The [DIY] tool can be unconventional, playful and fun and is freed from necessities that go beyond personal demands. The poetic and vernacular qualities outweigh practicalities and economic interests. A small, intimate gesture may prevail over a grand universal solution. 

experiment with clumsy and crooked DIY tools that help to slow down and unfamiliarize the workflow

Finding new ways to interrupt engrained habits of graphic designers is a gesture towards a more critical practice. A practice that is not only being shaped by proprietary tools, but instead one that re-evaluates and actively shapes graphic design tools and how they are being used

I have a similar motivation although I am not so interested in the tool as the locus of change. It's about being a water pianist. Its about ⊞ being a field involving more than one person. Its about interpersonal human structures and the boundaries and ports within them. And dissolving in different places in different unfamiliar ways.

Stopped on page 15 after this is more technical so I will read as I build tomorrow.

the next day, the technical chapter

What if you just listen to the digital output from Jian's modules? Make music with them? What happens if you plug analog inputs into them? Maybe something fun.

da code

The Friction Label module uses this typical format as inspiration, yet the parameters for the styling range in the extremes only and cause moments of failure and distortion. This effect encourages makers to test the margins and limitations

This is a really interesting constraint.

Weaver is on page 39. BOM:

• – 6 audio jacks
• 15 rotary potentiometers, 10k–
• 1 LED, 3 mm
• 1 resistor, 1k
• 2 pin headers, 1 x 20 sockets
• 1 LilyGO TTGO T8 ESP32-S2 + power supply
• audio patch cables
• 4 M3 bolts + nuts

 The operation is inspired by a wind or breeze that blows into a small body of text, playing with the words and carrying them to new places

This is lovely.

parameters regulate the strength, speed, acceleration and vortex of air flow

 The user has to let go of habitual precision and perfectionism and instead welcome happy accidents and little failures. The focus shifts from the final outcome to the process of creating,

 the practice directly feeds back into the shaping of the tool.

Does this happen in mainstream proprietary software? I like that some programs encourage me to make my own keyboard shortcuts. InDesign has the concept of "Workspaces", the visual layout of panels and toolbars that work for you personally (or a specific workflow).

Another interesting aspect of the modular setup is the possibility of collaboration. Due to the fragmented workflow, the tool can be operated by more than one user, which allows for a collective design approach and enables playful and interactive ways of working. The literal entanglement of the physical hardware modules manifests their complex interrelations and interactions. Similar to the single modules in the setup, a group of users may explore interesting and new ways to listen and respond in a collaborative design workflow.

Great.

Slow down your creative process and make it unfamiliar, tangible and situated! Embrace clumsiness and be open for the unexpected! Explore the detours, off-roads and so-called dead ends! There, you will hopefully find some inspiration and encouragements for your own future makings.

References

• Culkin, J. (1967) ‘A schoolman’s guide to Marshall McLuhan’, The Saturday Review, 18 March 1967, pp. 51-53, 70-72.
• Groten, A. (2019) ‘Hacking & Designing: Paradoxes of Collaborative Practice’, in Bogers, L. And Chiappini, L. (eds.) The Critical Makers Reader: (Un)learning Technology. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, pp. 237-244.
• Hertz, G. (2016) ‘What is Critical Making?’, Current, 18 April 2016. Available at: https://current.ecuad.ca/what-is-critical-making (Accessed: 13 April 2023).
• Howell, B. and Pogorzhelskiy, M. (no date) The Screenless Office. Available at: http://screenl.es (Accessed: 13 April 2023). *Korsten, F.-W. (2022) ‘criticality’, in Wesseling, J. and Cramer, F. (eds.) Making Matters. A Vocabulary for Collective Arts. Amsterdam: Valiz, pp. 105-112.
• Make Noise (no date) Echophon, MATHS and Function. Available at https://www.makenoisemusic.com (Accessed: 13 April 2023).
• Make Noise (no date) The Pillars of Hercules. Available at https://www.makenoisemusic.com/content/manuals/EchophonManual.pdf (Accessed: 13 April 2023).
• Manovich, L. (2013a) ‘Software is the Message’, Software Studies Initiative, 17 December 2013. Available at: http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2013/12/software-is-message-new-mini-article.html (Accessed: 13 April 2023).
• Manovich, L. (2013b) Software Takes Command. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
• McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1st edn. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Open Source Publishing (no date) ‘Tools’, Open Source Publishing. Available at http://osp.kitchen/tools/ (Accessed: 13 April 2023).
• De Heij, G. (no date) TOOLS SHAPE PRACTICE SHAPES TOOLS. Available at https://www. burg-halle.de/design/kommunikationsdesign/kommunikationsdesign/lehrangebote/l/toolsshapes-practice-shapes-tools/ (Accessed: 13 April 2023).
• Pater, R. (2021) CAPS LOCK. How capitalism took hold of graphic design, and how to escape from it. Amsterdam: Valiz.
• Ratto, M. and Hockema, S. (2009) ‘FLWR PWR: Tending the walled garden’, in Dekker, A. and Wolfsberger, A. (eds.) Walled Garden. Amsterdam: Virtueel Platform, pp. 51-60.
• Snelting, F. (2008) ‘Awkward gestures: designing with Free Software’, Freeze+Press. Available at: https://freeze.sh/_/2008/awkward/# (Accessed: 13 April 2023).

FLWR PWR: Tending the Walled Garden, Matt Ratto and Stephen Hockema

< Imagine a garden of dream flowers, powered by duracell,
made of abandoned Starbucks coffee cups, styrofoam cubes
cut from the latest iMac packing materials, a brain made in
Italy, a blossom made by 1/2 Tod 1/2 Bot. The flowers glow
with an eerie pulsating glow, sending secret missives across
a darkened room. Some flowers horde their individuality,
resisting attempts to transform, to change. Others broadcast
their distinctive natures broadly, encouraging nearby flowers
to go with them, to be like them. Still others promiscuously
adopt the patterns of others, reproducing, syncing, connecting.
They live, they die. The garden flourishes, it declines.>

What if your metaphor sucks?

Im not saying it does in this case.

The agents
(and the network itself ) thus become a kind of boundary
object (Star and Griesemer, 1999) that facilitates exchange and
sharing across disciplinary boundaries as well as being a mode
of engagement that explicitly connects technical work and
social analysis.

Is this art? Further reading: Star, S. L. and J. R. Griesemer, Reprint of Star and Griesemer 1989, ‘Institutional Ecology, ‘‘Translations’’, and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-1939.’ reprinted in Mario Biagioli (ed.), The Science Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, 505-524, 1999.

elision

1. the omission of a sound or syllable when speaking (as in I'm, let's ). "the shortening of words by elision"
2. the process of joining together or merging things, especially abstract ideas.

The final prototypes are not intended
to be displayed and to speak for themselves. Instead, they are
considered a means to an end, and achieve value though the
act of shared construction, joint conversation and reflection.

I really like the idea of this method, that something is created or explored outside and between individuals.

Using a shared
process of making as a common space for experimentation
encourages the development of a collective frame while
allowing disciplinary and epistemic differences to be both
highlighted and hopefully overcome.

This comes with all the usual difficulties of working together and collective action, not saying that's a reason not to do it but should be acknowledged at least.

This is a better version of what I was trying to do in the room for sound. It would be nice to find the code I'm curious what the GiftEconomy(), InfoCommons() and InfoNeighborhood() functions do. The metaphor of flowers has some nice aspects especially the sexual connotations. Does all communication have to be reproductive, can it have other functions? Communication because it's pleasurable? It strengthens social bonds, it's experimental, it relieves communicative tension. To become closer to God or as part of a ritual. So the other person feels good. Revenge communication. Make up communication. Break up communication.

A little bit of analysis of critical making at the end which is similar to my question, what if your metaphor sucks? But they suggest a few ways to tackle this: awareness, engagement at various levels, and scepticism.

Is scepticism a fundamentally rational and empirical method? Is it possible to have mystical and irrational scepticism?

Descartes was Here (?), Clemens Driessen

This comes from some pages I found loose beside the printer. I sat down at the coffee table and several copies of it were spread in front of me. It seems to start mid paragraph in a description of a surveying tool maybe called a Dutch circle.

this method reliably projected boundaries and allowed for the sale of land before it emerged from the water... a land-based private investment vehicle that produced a perfect grid landscape just as Descartes arrived in the Netherlands.

beating the bounds

how far is it from Alkmaar to Breda?

Descartes became buddies with a guy called Constantijn Huygens, whose son Christiaan would later invent the pendulum clock and thereby exact time.

the grid allowed an embrace of complexity: curved lines that could be described by mathematical formulas, and thereby were not a sign of chaos but an expression of the divine mathematical order assumed to be underlying nature.

What if I'm not? Lets doubt of our existence, while we are doubting.

scientific truth was equated with absolute certainty

This one is gone at least.

the Cartesian grid, trialed in the beemster polder, spread over the globe, rendering space measurable and governable, without bothering about places and particularities, allowing for land to be sold before anyone had even seen it 

Further reading: Descartes, Passions of the Soul

The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau

Consumer production

consumable

For example, the analysis of the images broadcast by television (representation) and of the time spent watching television (behavior) should be complemented by a study of what the cultural consumer "makes" or "does" during this time and with these images. 

Is what the consumer makes also in the category of representation, what separates it from behaviour, is he implying there is something outside of these two categories. Culture is presented to me and I represent it. Receptive and generative modes, is the point just that these are not clearly active/passive roles and are more mushy into eachother?

"consumption"... is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly

This certainly sounds like active consumption. There dont seem to be any real examples here though. Is production also a type of consumption? What am I consuming when I produce? Environments, methodologies, inheritance, pollenation.

speaking operates within the field of a linguistic system; it effects an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its speakers; it establishes a present relative to a time and place; and it posits a contract with the other (the interlocutor) in a network of places and relations. These four characteristics of the speech act<3> can be found in many other practices (walking, cooking, etc.).

His point in the introduction that "a relation defines its terms" could be applied more extremely here I think. Is speaking something done to language by speakers, or are speech acts the girders that connect speakers in a structure called language. A walk is an episode that creates a route for a walker in a space. A cooking act is an event where recipes, ingredients, bodies, heat, etc come into a relation with eachother.

If it is true that the grid of "discipline" is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also "miniscule" and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what "ways of operating" form the counterpart, on the consumer's (or "dominee's"?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order.

The territory is becoming more and more like the map but it is not there are cracks and tears and smudges.

the goal is not to make clearer how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology, but rather to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of "discipline:"

Why do you want to bring this to light? Is it a good idea to produce something that reveals the occult exodisciplines (esodisciplines, paradisciplines) that consumers are using and making. Is there a tension between producer and consumer, and if so whose side are you on?

allowing the logic of unselfconscious thought to be taken seriously

Can we doubt ourselves while we doubt? Take as a departure point the possibility that you are imaginary.

must seek to restore to everyday practices their logical and cultural legitimacy

I guess this is the reason he wants to bring the practices into this world of writing, to give them a voice and legitimacy in this context. It feels a little like appropriation or domination in some way, of writing over other practices. Things that exist outside of words. Maybe its just translation but even then.

this cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, an activity that is unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized, remains the only one possible

inferior access to information, financial means, and compensations of all kinds elicits an increased deviousness, fantasy, or laughter. 

The tactics of practice

unrecognised producers, poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality

I mean the language is very romanticised which is nice. What does it mean to use romantic language to describe reading and the reader. Is the author trying to show me affection? He is trying to touch me but maybe also to give me space, to see if there is something between us or if we can make something between us.

"indirect" or "errant" trajectories obeying their own logic... trajectories form unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space

Unreadable except maybe to the performer of the trajectory. A reading movement in this way is somehow symbolic or generating meaning. And then readable through a sort of affective proprioception, an awareness on the part of the reader/performer of where the reading is bringing them, or taking them away from, or moving them through. The forms that the reading creates.

the trajectories trace out the ruses of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop

It is trickery. A magic trick. This is maybe suggesting some sort of deception though, on the part of the subject against the system. While this sounds fun it's not really acknowledging that the rest of the system that is being deceived is also made up at least in part of humans. So how do you know you're not deceiving, hurting, or even abusing other humans while performing your little magic tricks?

 Statistical inquiry, in breaking down these "efficatious meanderings" into units that it defines itself, in reorganising the results of its analyses according to its own codes, "finds" only the homogenous. The power of its calculations ties in its ability to divide, but it is precisely through this analytic fragmentation that it loses sight of what it claims to seek and to represent.

VIDE AND DECONQUER. What is the temporal version of a void? non-events. boredom. wasting (vast-ing) time. slacking. not doing anything. also fragmentation sounds kinda nice Im ok with that.

The "proper" is a victory of space over time. On the contrary, because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized "on the wing". Whatever it wins, it does not keep.

This sounds a little like opportunist stealing. I dunno, the article in general is making these tactics sound very desirable, morally good, revolutionary, but is not really addressing in any way whether the tactics have consequences. If your trying to empower maybe you need to accept that that power can be used. I understand that it is written from a place of the tactics being the consumers' only option and way of operating, but it could be a bit more critical about their effects.

everyday practices that produce without capitalising, that is, without taking control over time

Not taking control is good though. Producing without capitalising is also good. I guess my question is whose space and time are you taking? The article sometimes mentions hunters and I think its a relevant metaphor. A hunter navigates through and takes from an ecosystem. In an attempt to survive? Is a forager better than a hunter? Is a gardener worse than a forager? A farmer? A land-owner? Humans have to eat or else they die. What do the bacteria in my gut want to eat? How much control do they have over my desires and my volition? How much of an effect do they have on our environment?

pedestrians, in the streets they fill with the forests of their desires and goals

What parts of me want to walk. Not my feet. Skin has a microbiome. Skin is scavenged by cute cutaneous microorganisms. Colonies grow, other bacteria produce molecules as a tactic to inhibit colonization. They desire to avoid extermination. They want to live, not necessarily together or in harmony. But a harmony or allostasis emerges.

an innovation infiltrated into the text and even into the terms of a tradition. Imbricated

There are so many contradictory driving forces but I suppose there is a flow in some direction or directions generally and things start to fit together, and start to break apart. Is there a border between laminarity and turbulence, can it be crossed or mixed. Can some chaotic advection occur.

the many ways of establishing a kind of reliability within the situations imposed on an individual, that is, of making it possible to live in them by reintroducing into them the plural mobility of goals and desires—an art of manipulating and enjoying

But like less manipulation and maybe a better approach is surfing a wave which can be intentional and yeah of course enjoyable but its not about reclaiming control but accepting your ability to move and playing with it, from a place of awareness and love which I'm not sure this text is coming from.

the involvement of the subject diminishes in proportion to the technocratic expansion of these systems. Increasingly constrained, yet less and less concerned with these vast frameworks, the individual detatches himself from them without being able to escape them and can henceforth only try to outwit them, to pull tricks on them, to rediscover

It's all framed a bit aggressively and I'm not sure if I'm into the whole predator/prey thing. I think the same stuff could be described more playfully. Although maybe this is insensitive to the power dynamics that are actually happening in some situations, maybe the consumer is pushed more into an inescapable position that requires evasive tactics.

the microscopic, multiform, and innumerable connections between manipulating and enjoying, the fleeting and massive reality of a social activity at play with the order that contains it

The osmosis or advection or maybe even dissipation between manipulation and enjoyment is some sort of moral dissolution. When is it ok to enjoy, or to manipulate. Says who? Which parts are the social and which parts are the order. At what point does living together turn into an order. It's something that happens at a lot of different moments or places, and its different for different observers. I guess just like have regular check ins with eachother? Uhh chaos seems so complex sometimes but it doesnt have to be heavy. But there is a lot at stake so its ok and maybe good if it feels heavy sometimes.

🦌

Further reading: Musil's man without qualities, Alain Desrosiere's "Elements pour l'histoire des nomenclatures socio-professionnelles" in Pour un Histoire de la Statistique, Le Livre des Ruses la stratégie politique des arabes

Musicking, Christopher Small

The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world.

Ideal in this context meant not as utopic or even something desirable but more in the sense of being a relationship separated from its material or actual circumstances.

a way
of knowing that would unite the scientists' impersonal way of knowing the
world with the human knowledge of ethics, values and the sacred. The
purpose of this way of knowing is not to dominate the world, as is that of
scientific knowledge, but to live well in it.

anyone who cultivates
a garden must constantly be astounded by the way in which plants not only
respond to information, such as changes in the intensity and duration of
light, changes in temperature, and even the presence of other plants nearby,
in ways that are appropriate to them and to their mode of being, but also
give information, through their color, their mode of growth and their flowering,
and modify their environment in order to make it more favorable to
their growth and reproduction. Further, the seemingly infinitely complex
interaction between plants, microorganisms, insects, other animals and
human beings suggests that the biosphere, the world of living creatures, is
indeed a vast and intricate network of what by Bateson's definition we can
call mind, all giving and responding to information. The mind relates to the
environment outside the creature not by mere passive reception of what is
"out there" but by an active process of engagement with it. We could say
that creatures shape their environment as much as they are shaped by it.

Some stuff about Gaia.

Why Publish Noise?, Miekal And

https://hub.xpub.nl/bootleglibrary/read/82/pdf

because.
because causes are the earth.
because once unchecked & unleashed, the visual/verbal thought form is instinctively sensory behaviour.

experimental publishing is the reversal of a disposable media which reduces all information to identical & easy to swallow info pills... Oftentimes, obscurity is a survivalistic necessity & the only action is producing disinformation-objects which threaten æsthetics or investigate divergence.

tHE oNTOLOGY OF pERFORMANCE, pEGGY pHELAN

the forgetting (or stealing) of the object is a fundamental energy of its descriptive recovering. The description itself does not not reproduce the object, it rather helps us to restage and restate the effort to remember what is lost. The descriptions remind us how loss acquires meaning and generates recovery - not only of and for the object, but for the one who remembers. The disappearance of the object is fundamental to performance; it rehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs always to be remembered.

Edible Feminisms: On Discard, Waste, and Metabolism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG9cDpkOnA0

what things connect contemporary american food culture with the production of science, with facts, with data, with claims about the nature of how things work in the world?

fermenting what is normally thrown out, in fermentation technologies what is ugly old, or funky could be made delicious, desirable to eat, and significantly more valuable

the potential for science to turn ick into yum

There are lots of really icky and cold things even outside of food. How to make them lekker or gezellig.

the celebration of the undervalued, of the left-over

the ways in which the edible and the wasted cross paths

research not just on food but on eating

It's not about food: the actions like ingestion, the states like edibility.

what do more sustainable communities even look like anyway and is that always the same as more just communities?

we rely on the idea that food brings us together, transcending racial and gender alliance to unify us in a shared love of cuisine, and I wish it were that simple, food is just as susceptible to the same oppressive power structures that impact every other part of our lives and we have to dismantle them.

Coertia(?) Wilson

now what? and I knew the work that a wanted to do wasnt just to continue to be reactionary... who are we when we take the trauma away? ... the work of visioning, the work of joy, the work of building something.

tanya fields

urban farm: im very intentional about not calling it a community garden it is an urban farm, that is the model.

we poor people working together to try to survive. some people talk about the concept of resilience, i think we wake up every day and we put on our clothes and we maybe get our bootstraps if we have them or they're not broken and we get up and we take care of our babies and our elders.

lisa tiny gray-garcia

there is no eating without provisioning

I wanted to think about what it feels like to be eaten alive by whiteness

kyla tompkins

why does whiteness feel like it's eating us alive?

we are addicted to the products of empire, there is no sweetness in our lives without colonial extraction and slavery... there is no sugar buzz until after colonialism and slavery

sylvia winter

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1536504214545763

i hope when I die I know as little as possible about coffee and wine as I can ever manage... im not interested in taste and I am interested in flavour. im really interested in how the ways we talk about food are often about the performance of class identity.

kyla tompkins

we need to figure out what it feels like to live in garbage, and some of us have been living in garbage all along.

i would challenge many of us that our ancestors who practiced this did not see it as preserving waste, it was an extension of their food system.

indigenous european cultures as an alternative to whiteness, rejecting and breaking the myth of whiteness. dunno maybe this makes sense in certain contexts its complicated though. in america in 2018 maybe a useful story but in europe in 2023 a bit too much nationalism going around.

the mother.

as soon as I slice an apple it is considered processed

legal limitations around food processing. new york city department of health and mental hygiene.

im not really selling food, people are giving it away as donations... there are barriers that keep people out

waste: thats what I was calling it, now remember language is important. and I remember one of the elders being like im from down south this wasnt waste, if you didnt can what surplus you had then you didnt eat during the winter.

There is no Identity or Self, Ellyn Kaschak

https://www.meer.com/en/66048-there-is-no-identity-or-self

I prefer the term “mattering” to meaning for its ability to encompass and enfold, to embrace meaning and caring, mind and heart, feelings and ideas, for they are not separate nor are they related in a linear “cause and effect” sequence. Instead they are inextricably intertwined, each implicate in the others and deeply enfolded in the matrix of human experience.

there are no isolated and unchanging locations within the brain or on the mattering map.

mattering can be conceptualized as a force field, an interpersonal gravity. There are multiple energetic forces impinging upon any individual and any social interaction. Much as various areas of the brain may be linked in a particular response, so does mattering always have multiple sources and manifestations.

And discussion about entrainment eg of menstrual cycles (although someone mentioned recently this is debunked, unproven, mythical), lovers, kin. I'm very interested in how this removes the personal/social boundary. I think it is important to respect this boundary in a lot of places as it is necessary for some individuals to protect themselves and survive. That's what skin is for. But considering what parts of it are artificial and where it can (caringly, carefully, with love) be crossed for good is interesting and I think can be beneficial. It's to do with giving up on and being free from fixed identity for individuals as well as groups.

Further reading:

Sight Unseen: Gender and Race through Blind Eyes, Ellyn Kaschak.

Lipton, 2002 (referenced in text but title not given).

Lecture about biological underpinnings of religiosity, Dr Robert Sapolsky

https://youtu.be/4WwAQqWUkpI?si=UmaN4SONkCNvzJm7

Metamagical thinking more common with schizotypal people, the people who were most likely the shamans for most of human history.

We impose this totally arbitrary useless destructive structure, at a time when everything else feels like you're walking on quicksand. We all do this as some sort of adaptation to periods of anxiety

very mathematical qualities to it and it's never quite right and you've gotta do it all over again... one of the really interesting insights into what ocd is about is that this is an anxiety disorder, it is a pathological attempt to impose structure, to impose predictability, to impose control, in a world where everything is pathologically provoking of a sense of dis-ease and uncertainty and anxiety.

Fixed action patterns and rituals, like a dog walking in a circle before it sleeps, are milder versions of the same genetic tendencies towards ocd.

1=animism 2=dualism 3=christianity 4=empirical rationalism 5=pentagram? pentecostal? something pent up for sure

Our number system is based on not just tens but also threes: a thousand, a million, a billion. Is this a Christian influence?

Some of the times what a religious leader is about is someone who's excellent at performing rituals

Kafkaesque for sure but it's the Hunger Artist.

truly involved ritualistic religious belief is often at the cost of doing anything else

This seems like a bit of an exaggeration but it has a cost for sure

the more I wash the dirtier I get

Martin Luther

Would you expect to see differences in the incidences of depression depending on religiosity? And boy do you see that with a vengeance. One of the healthiest things you can do with your life is to be religious, and to be highly religious: it is a very strong protector against major depression, religious belief extends your life expectancy...

But does it come from social religiosity or personal spirituality?

Art as a superstition: just because it was affective that one time or sometimes, you assume there is a causal link. What does our art deal with? Things we still don't understand. We've gotten a bit better at understanding our emotions and the materialist world we exist in, so recently we've doubled down on political and social art. Individual identity and community dynamics. Things and occurrences that are magical to us, that we don't understand the causes for. Digital art, sci fi. Disorder and social disruption. The environment as we are starting to understand it and interact with it in a new way. So we build superstitions and experiment with rituals.

Lying awake, mark salzman

what are we to make of who we are if even in one case somebody had arrived at that point because of just a storm of neurotransmitter abnormalities rather than the journey that all of us associate with helping to define who we are? 

Maybe rewatch this one next: https://youtu.be/_njf8jwEGRo?si=ys-xzGO4qVXud5xk

Cruel optimism, Lauren berlant

Introduction

conceiving of a contemporary moment from within that moment. One of this books central claims is that the present is perceived, first, affectively: the present is what makes itself present to us before it becomes anything else

digital lethargy, tung-hui hu

In the 1850s manual labour began to be replaced by immaterial or communicative work. We still use our hands though.

these changes led Western society to increasingly idealise a subject who is less a follower of norms or fixed rules than one who takes responsibility and initiative to make their own rules.

Alain Ehrenberg, La fatigue d'etre soi. Autonomy is the root of burnout and depression.

The metaphor of the dam in Sleep Dealers as control of resources, the water is sold at an extortionate price and the villagers have to walk miles to meet their needs. Meanwhile labour is piped as a service directly to employers' building sites, media outlets and attack drones. Ultimately the labourer uses the drone to destroy the dam, where guerrilla tactics outside of the system were always ineffective. Unblocking the system at this point is optimistically portrayed as a solution to all problems, but presumably in real life each chakra needs to be flowing freely to become an airbender. Designers don't fly attack drones but they do have some power.

racial capitalism... Robinson gives the example of poor mercinaries—"free lancers"—recruiters into sixteenth-century European armies, such as Scottish and Welsh fighting for England

Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism p23. Is there presumably an Irish element to this story also. Free lancers history in the past 400 years.

What if I do the same interviews on fffiver? Or with wdka students who are yet to start a career in design? These people I suspect have very similar manual tasks, and maybe similar ideological stances. But geographically socially economically in different positions.

in this extended present, in the interim period, waiting is both torturous and celebratory, affectively charged but not yet resolved into an emotion or an action. Waiting is "in the air", as it were, and waiting with other people is as much a political state as an actual confrontation.

Am InDesign plugin that makes you wait or stops the software or introduces another being.

the disappointments of the present day, rather than narratives of futures that are always about to come, whether dystopian or utopian. By attempting to better describe the time that seems dead or otherwise in suspension, they help to develop different vocabulary for conceiving of time in the digital age.

To talk about any work with care involves less assumptions, no need to "humanise" what is already human. It at the same time is and is not boring, satisfying, stressful, menial, meaningless, impactful, important, damaging, temporary, craft, art, labour to varying degrees. All work. And it's always more andklpp less than just work.

liberal imaginations of freedom can be limiting... [liberals] tend to see agency as something that resists the constraints of power, and miss actions that might be indifferent to or even want to subsist within norms or constraints.

Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety.

feelings of attachment and aspiration... The self sabotaging thoughts that spring from the lethargy at the periphery of our digital lives

Not caring. Sometimes caring. Whatever. Just leave me alone. No wait don't go please. I'm sorry. I'm just a bit frustrated and I'm tired I guess. I dunno.

attempts to undo the privileged position of the agentive subject can help us understand both the strange status of repetitive and quasi-robotic labour in today's digital age and the fact that this labour is often racialised or gendered performed not by humans but by things.

Does treating all work as robotic and boring add to or remove from this? It keeps breaking the distinction, everyone is pressing buttons, everyone is bored, nothing matters, nothing makes sense.

Is a visual communicator a caricature of what were all doing all the time?

Grasping desperately to hold onto the real world just as desperately hoping and needing to stay disconnected. Not believing in reality but loving and fearing and feeling it in a way that is often bearable. The boredom that emerges on average.

questions of lethargy delay us from discussing and stabilising various forms of being into definable states (human, bot, subject, object) and from prescribing a redemptive form of action. Lethargy is a drag: it weighs down our ability to rush to solutions, and forces us to listen to the unresolved present.

This is essentially what I'm trying to do with chapter one of my thesis and also the project generally. Maybe chapter two is too aspirational, even with the defeatism of chapter three? Would it be more interesting to just sit in the treacle of now and totally ignore the idea that anything will come after this? Less visioning and more looking. No projection, where are you even projecting from?

the world, the flesh and the Devil, jd Bernal

Introduction by McKenzie Wark

Bernal was what we would now call an accelerationist. He was an Irish landowner and had a "precocious identification with the cause of Sinn Fein"

Bernal broached the question of what it meant to be a citizen of science and a citizen as a scientist.

for Bernal, utopian thought ought to replace religion as a way of feeling out the relation of present to future. In place of heaven or apocalypse, he offered a kind of writing that finds the conditions of the possible in language itself.

evolutiona matter of perversion and a perversion of matter... Nature itself is perverse or in today's language—queer

desire itself has to evolve. Bernal is not a rationalist

The idea of evolving from personal to social desires sounds so potentially dangerous, religious, repressive.

how can the unconscious also become productive?

Eww no fuck off my conscious is already too productive leave me alone.

perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out or of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars.

Adorno, Minima Moralia. I don't know if I can imagine doing this as an individual but I see why it's appealling.

Further reading: paol Corno, a grammar of the multitude. Theodore Adorno, the culture industry, Bernal the social function of science.

perhaps social struggles cannot be effectively fight by politics, philosophy, social science and the arts without attention to their scientific and technical components.

man will not untimely be content to be parasitic on the stars but will invade them and organise them for his own purposes.

Bernal says we should form "small" communities of 20–30,000 people inside man made exoplanets. "There would probably be no more need for government than in a modern hotel" and "the inhabitants can be divided into the personnel or crew, and the citizens or passengers. With the first ... we need not be concerned" 😬 what about a movie where there is a revolution in one of these globes, also the movie could just be called revolution? Do these globes spin maybe not.

Hes kind of right the way he says parasitic in a negative way though, would it be better to be less vampiric. More symbiotic. More in tune with the oneness of the universe.

Scratching the surface, Adrian Shaughnessy

why would anyone want to read about graphic design? ... designers are usually too busy to spend time reading about their craft.

Even Aido knows we're all veeery busy. In this situation I am reading about graphic design in the early 21st century to understand where some of my own beliefs and those of my contemporaries came from. This book is a collection of essays about design written by a British man in the period of 1995–2013. What were our views ten or thirty years ago? Have they changed since then? Are there elements we have abandoned, which ones and why? How did we change our minds, did we admit we were wrong or make up a reason so it looks like it wasn't our fault? Are there any elements we've added in, did we do it reluctantly or excitedly? Are there any old dreams we still cling to?

graphic design is a secondary art form: it needs clients, content providers, and numerous other midwives before it can exist. It is an applied art, dependent on others for it's existence. And yet, in it's higher forms, it is my belief that it can be as potent and beguiling as any form of primary art.

Why are graphic designers concerned with this question of whether design is or is not art? I usually get the impression designers want to be artists and therefore want what they and their peers make to be works of art. Is the implication that design is too useful to be art? Too well paid? Not individualistic enough? What are the "higher forms" referred to in the quote above? There is a quote from Michael Rock (Fuck Content, 2009) that says stellar examples of design are those "that change the way we look at the world" for example Piet Zwart's catalogues for electrical cable. Rock also believes in the "designer as author":

we are insecure about the value of our work. We are envious of the power, social position and cachet that artists and authors seem to command. By declaring ourselves “designer/authors” we hope to garner similar respect. Our deep-seated anxiety has motivated a movement in design that values origination of content over manipulation of content.

Michael Rock (Fuck Content, 2009)

graphic design now occupies a position where it should be confident enough as a discipline to be both a vehicle for fulfilling social needs and for expressing independant thought. A discipline equal to art, not aspiring to art.

quoted from James Goggin in Iaspis forum on design and critical practice: the reader, Ericson M et al. 2009.

Why want art? Is Jamie implying design is usually only fulfilling social needs or only expressing independant thought? Which one? Does art always do both and design should too? Or design is capable of both and art is irrelevant? What does it mean to be equal to art, is it some way of measuring the moral or ethical value of the work? Is art the "most good" making?

I don't want to ban advertising

there really is a price to pay for creating the seductive tropes of modern commerce

there will always be work for designers who refuse to bother with the new ethical dimension in business... Not only has the world changed, but it will never be the way it was

Not sure what this piece about social design in 2009 is attempting to say. Social design is a financially profitable and maybe even necessary strategy. "Free market orthodoxy" is nearly dead and will never die. There is a "moral advantage in being ethical". What does it mean to gain a moral advantage through design practice? An example is given of wayfinding as social design as opposed to shampoo bottles, the subtext I assume is that consumerism is bad. But it's ok to keep designing shampoo labels and bottles and shampoo if they become "ethically sound and truthful". What is true shampoo?

I guess the term "social design" was younger in 2009 and less sure of its identity. A profit motivation was already clearly an element of engaging in work of this sort. The proximity of the financial crisis probably made the idea of wealth a little different to how it feels in 2023; maybe unachievable. Aido is clearly sceptical of the free market and banks, he mentions disillusionment, the environmental movement and cultural politics but doesn't tie these together with social design in a way that would be more obvious to us now.

the ongoing colonization of public space by media owners that has allowed radical poster art to be swept aside by acres of anodyne billboards

Mentioned in a review of Chaumont poster festival 2010.

most of the posters in the competition were advertising small cultural events

Design for culture is, or was at the time, "more art"? Is this because the designers have more opportunity to express individual ideas, or because the poster makes less money, or doesn't have to make as much sense? Is it a moral thing, are these posters less bad or even maybe design for good?

as I drooled over the technical and artistic verve on display [at the exhibition of russian constructivist posters], I couldn't help noticing that here too were the beginnings of graphic design as a tool of coercion and persuasion. Here was graphic design being used to sell something: in this case the benefits of collectivism and industrialisation

What was he drooling over, while having ethical concerns with the function of the posters? I would guess from the phrase "technical and artistic" it is related to some of the craft elements of design such as typography, print techniques, layout, etc being well executed. It may also relate to originality or creativity in composition, harmony, this is really speculative though I'm not sure. Also interesting that he said constructivists who were communists used design to "sell" collectivism and industrialisation. Design for AS is really tied up in a commercial capitalist system even when confronted with it's opposite.

"L'Oreal TV commercials" mentioned as modern propaganda, this guy really didn't like shampoo. What sort of haircut did Adrian Shaughnessy have in 2010? Was he possibly bald? I think not, I think he found both his hair and himself trapped in the lather of the shampoo industry.

When reviewing the AIGA Next conference in Denver Colorado, 2008, design critic Adrian Shaughnessy tells a joke:

The venue was shared with a beer festival, but it was easy to tell the designers from the beer fans. The beer fans were more serious.

This joke is funny because in the setup where it is easy to tell them apart, the reader should assume the beer fans are drunk and therefore raucous, misbehaving or maybe just having a lot of fun. But then he unexpectedly suggests that they were in fact "more serious" than the designers. This gives the reader a problem to address: is he claiming the designers were even more outrageous that what we assumed of the beer fans, or the beer fans were in fact taking their own conference seriously? As both seem unbelievable the true funniness of the joke hits home in it's implied it's meaning: graphic designers are boring as fuck.

the high number of women attending and presenting, it felt like roughly 50/50 with perhaps a small bias towards the female side... It gave the conference a well rounded wholeness that was refreshing.

In the previous paragraph to this quote there was a list of names of speakers, seven of which were male and four female. This is roughly 64/36. But I suppose either way the percentage comes to 100 which is well rounded and whole.

yet again, graphic design skills off into the corner wearing a cap with a D on it: D for dreadful

What is the role of shame in graphic design, or the role of dread? What was it about the ideas of John Duns Scotus that caused so much dread, what is the difference between graphic design and the universe?

[designers] have become accustomed to prospering by catering for the insatiable appetite for consumption that has characterised the past few decades. 

In reference to what do we do now in 2012 post financial crash.

it appears that we are entering a 'post-graphic design' era: a time when pretty much anyone can make graphic design, and when, in a networked and 'template-for-everything' world, communication can be had more cheaply and more easily than at any time in history. In the post-graphic design era, the demand and need for routine graphic design skills will inevitably diminish.

Did this happen? Can we measure how many professional and amateur graphic designers there have been at different times in history? Was there ever a time without graphic design, will there ever be again? Is there graphic design now?

the Google homepage — a brutal display of functionality. Clearly, no graphic designer has been near it.

Is this a joke or serious? I think serious. AS is in that case implying that designers make things less functional or less brutal or maybe both.

we have reached a point, in the homogenised West, where good graphic design is everywhere. The battle has been won: every business knows it needs good design.

He's being tongue in cheek about this stuff and saying he likes the brutalism of the Google homepage, but acknowledging "good design" is more pervasive. Do people really believe this other design is better than what Google offered at the time?

design has become, more often than not, a badge of mediocrity. The old modernist dream of good design standing for rationality and human values has been flipped. Today, good design is little more than a cosmetic agent, an obscuring agent

Relation of cosmetic to cosmos and chaos. Design is the cosmos that obscures the natures of realities. Can the surface be scratched, is it just more surface underneath? I still have the belief that he had in 2006 that modernism is associated with rationality and this link should be or is broken. Where did we inherit that shared belief from?

the Google [logo] has become a little beacon of insurrection, a symbol of strength in a world in which graphic designers have become the agents of conformity.

If Google just switched back to their old logo, would everything be ok again?

our storehouse of typographic wisdom will be depleted if we lose our connection with typography's glorious past. Sometimes you have to go back to go forwards.

Do graphic designers see themselves as progressive? Is this sentiment conservative? There's a difference between preserving knowledge and being conservative generally, maybe I'm being too aggressive towards this guy. But "glorious past" is a bit much.

finding a definition of graphic design that express the fullness of the subject is becoming increasingly difficult... Graphic design becomes more fragmented and less homogenised.

2011.

design must embrace and adopt the culture of it's new environment and cast off notions of artistic grandeur

Quote from Frank Peters, chair of chartered society of designers, 2010.

the mainstream design industry shook off its 'notions of artistic grandeur' thirty years ago and became hyper-professionalised.

we will always need designers who can design shampoo bottles

Is it possible to design the perfect shampoo bottle? Have we reached the end of capitalism or will there always be more shampoo bottles to design? How many more shampoo bottles do you want from me before you're happy?

Again AS is saying there is a need for designers with 'green and ethical credentials' rather than 'estate agents'. Design in his opinion should work for a higher or different moral aim than profit alone.

designers are outsiders... for example the design education system sits apart from mainstream education... design is still not fully recognised as a 'grown up' profession by government and decision makers.

Are designers really outsiders? I certainly get the impression they would like to be, and it seems to be part of the myth. Re cc interview and the quote where someone detaches the ethical decisions of their clients from working for them as a designer. Does this narrative absolve the designers sins? Also being an outsider is cool and artsy of course.

Core77.com Don Norman design thinking a useful myth

https://www.core77.com/posts/16790/design-thinking-a-useful-myth-16790

design will remain parochial and tangential to cultural life until it develops, and surrounds itself with a robust and sophisticated critical discourse

design will remain parochial and tangential

the notion of restraint has always been a favourite battle cry for graphic designers. As designers, we extol the virtues of white space and we remind ourselves that 'less is more'.

Are graphic designers in a battle? With who? Maximalists?

graphic design is by it's nature almost entirely referential... Graphic design is never allowed to be itself.

Intertwingled, Dechow, D., Struppa, D.

The Future of Transclusion, Akscyn, R.M. (2015)

Akscyn, R.M. (2015). The Future of Transclusion. In: Dechow, D., Struppa, D. (eds) Intertwingled. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5_15

Expiditee is a system that removes many concepts of data, programming and interaction that we are used to. No desktop, dialogue boxes, files, folders, layers or menu bars. No editing mode, no focus, no scrolling. No names, text cursor or saving, apparently no user interface just content. Classes (and objects, as well as over a hundred other concepts of object-oriented programming)

No declarations (variables are self-typing). No functions (there are only procedures). No keywords (no reserved terms). No programs (there is no program level, execution can begin at any block). No symbol-controlled calling (all calls are done by links).

3.4 Results of Omissions Trajectory
In short, the over-40 years of ZOG/KMS/Expeditee trajectory has been an embarrassingly slow “de-learning” of many of the concepts computer science has used to advance the state of the art over the past five decades. Thus, from the outside, these systems appear as though little or nothing has been developed, which is precisely what was intended so that, akin to a car windshield, users are rarely aware they are using a system. Instead, they are able to keep their attention on the task at hand.

Layers in graphics programs as an example of transclusion, also style sheets. What is transcludable for me? What if transclusions like style sheets are filtered the way a graphic layer can be. What are the blending modes for css stacks? Why cascading what other forms of confluence can there be? Meeting of the waters in Brazil, the Alaknanda and the Bhagirathi at Devprayag, Uttarakhand.

He offers four dimensions to expand transclusion:

Expanding the sources of accessible material that is permissibly transcludable (i.e., does not violate copyright as well as generally accepted norms)

Expanding the set of transformations that can be performed on the transcluded material

Decreasing the size of the smallest grain size of transcludeable material

Making transclusions recursive

I think the second one interests me the most but maybe also the third. Can I transclude just the third paragraph or just the last eleven seconds of your tiktok. Can I just transclude your print styles or every page on your wiki written by more than one author.

It will always be better to be able to use just the right-sized building block for the purpose at hand, e.g., only part of an image, text, or code.

the fastest way to do something is to not have to do it at all

What can a <trans> element be? Can it be seen without being defined? Is there space for it? How is it allowed to behave? Does it exist, if so where? Wrong questions maybe. Where else? Still the wrong question.

Types of Technology, Carl Mitcham

http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Mitcham%20Types%20of%20Tech%201978.htm#E%E2%80%99.%20Making%20and%20using

2. Technology as Process

p231 technology is, amongst other things:

means for realization of the Gestalt of the worker (Jünger) or any supernatural self-concept (Ortega)

These sound like interesting sources for further reading.

Teaching Machines How To Act Like Humans And Animals | Spark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAg66jrvpHA&t=581s

https://www.hellbrunn.at/en/trick-fountains/mechanical-theatre-1

Andreas Jakob von Dietrichstein

The automaton as theatre, machines as actors. Bots trying to pass as human.

the city becomes a kind of vast mechanical opera

Performance/machines as models of poteential society. Machines are virtual, performances are the same as tools they all have a magic circle.

Rosenegger conducted the work on this theatre under armed guard 

(from the video, apparently all the protestants were thrown out of SAlzburg a decade previously and Rosenegger was protestant)

The miner Lorenz Rosenegger von Dürrnberg offered  to  redesign the grotto

(from the website)

Rosenegger  was  also  commissioned  to construct  an  “organ  works” 

What does it mean to receive a commission under armed guard? Do creative labourers have freedom of religion? Are automatons protestant if their creator is protestant? Can bots have protests? Do organs work? Do organs perform work? Do organs perform? Do bots have organs? What do they do? Are organs tools or performers? Who has the right to be an organ ethnographer? Who has the right to perform auto(maton)ethnography?

What Design Can't Do, Silvio Lorusso

What is this image before the table of contents. I see a hooded figure I see the inside of an ear a cartoon octopus black billowing smoke a hill covered in bushes a lions forehead and all of this before the table is set. For a moment I see nothing all the image shows me is itself and my brain shorts somewhere just behind my eyes for the second time today it makes me panic a little if I don't think am I of course but there is something disorienting when your skin is everywhere in flakes and your everything else through the floor

Designers are torn between having to believe, for professional and vocational reasons, in the modern promise of a harmonic, fluid orderliness and being caught in an absurd, glitchy reality. They are the ideal type of a hyper-modern subjectivity — disillusioned evangelists who are losing faith.

Designers aren't ideal they are real.

white man crying. Bas Jan Ader's *In search of the miraculous* is named after P. D . Ouspensky's book describing the teachings of George Gurdjeiff. "Humans are born asleep, live in sleep, and die in sleep, only imagining that they are awake with few exceptions." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurdjieff_movements

It might be that 'at the intersection of' (an expression commonly found in designers' bios) there is no one else other than you.

I don't share this experience.

there is a four by four magic square in this engraving. I'm mostly interested in the rainbow and the comet. How did Dürer feel about floods? Where do comets come from? What are we to do with them?

I hear cymbals and trumpets and drums that fill the air with noises and tumult, muffling then the silence of the sun disc and its prodigy. I want a cloak woven with threads of solar gold. The sun is the magical tension of silence.

Tangible Tools, Colm O'Neill

I follow an intuition that misunderstandings of what graphic design is come from the ways it is practices, on computers, with computers and for a computer based existence

What does misunderstanding mean in this context? I guess im interested in these other versions of what graphic design means and where they come from.

efficiency and efficacy... efficiency being an avoidance of waste, efficacy being the ability to produce a desired effect

It's kind of embarrassing if Colm sees this but yeah I'm reading things you wrote because they're super interesting and I want to do a good interview.

conclusion

Confusion, frustration

Its like all this design was made on the same grid 

What's wrong with that? What's wrong with templates?

Cynical belief: as well as similar influences and environments, designers make similar work because they use the same tools.

Graphic design that is a regularised transaction. 

Confused, disenchanted. "Re-identification as craftspeople".

What it means to practice with abstracting / abstracted tools and understanding the politics that surround these tools.

The conclusion seems to focus on lack of awareness of tools in two directions; the influence they have on what is created (described as negative or boring, causes him frustration), and the politics they are engaged in. The first point seems to invoke a stronger emotional response from Colm, using the same old tools is boring and he is confused by others who don't question this. He is expressing some disenchantment with what is created by graphic designers collectively, and suggests new tools as a way to re-enchant.

I mean I also went back to college because I was bored and disenchanted. I wonder sometimes how much that is the driving force, while other factors sometimes feel more important like the politics of software and intellectual property. I think it's great that he's talking about this too it's a personal element of the politics that people sometimes aren't comfortable talking about. There is something very unfulfilling about being a commercial artist and making the same shit every day. I think there are other factors causing this as well as tools: the companies the work is made for, the aims of the design, the roles of design in marketing and advertising, design as commodification, the need for commercial design to be reliable, marketable, profitable.

The need for digital literacy extends beyond professional practitioner

He also makes a point about education which is interesting in relation to new dark age.

Colmophon

osp.kitchen/tools/ospkit

usemodify.com/fonts

artlibre.org/licence

Pelican static site generator

Awkward Gestures, Femke Snelting

free as in ze.sh

https://freeze.sh/_/2008/awkward/awkward_gestures.mdsh

free as in art

Although a streamlined process might be faster, it runs the risk of everything looking the same in the end. Thus, in order to make your mark, a diversification of tools is necessary.

What's wrong with everything looking the same? Does design need to be different? Maybe if most designers keep using adobe tools then most designed objects will continue to be boring, and people will gradually be less affected by design. Accellerationist boring predictable design. Make more crap until no one listens at all. Reuse the same poster from a different event last year. Make another spiderman movie. Release New Coke again. Switch back to the original recipe again. Make all the new property developments look exactly the same and vote for whoever is already in charge.

software does not merely determine the boundaries of visual expression. Because it is constantly present, it conditions our practice in terms of division of labour, vocabulary and the physical relationship with the digital medium. 

This is of course much more interesting.

OSP is first of all an attempt to facilitate a design practice that starts from a critical use of technology and explicitly functions in an ecology of knowledge based on distribution and circulation rather than competition and exclusion.

And this. But still I wonder if being critical of technology is the best focus. It seems to me more a useful lens for critique of labour conditions more generally. Does the software really limit division of labour? Is there for example a real world where one designer has InDesign installed and one illustrator has Illustrator installed, and they only interact through adobe standards and the creative cloud? More realistic to me are the jewellery designer who makes her own ads in Canva and the sound engineer who learnt Premiere Pro to survive through the pandemic.

William Morris's Arts and Crafts movement […] reflected upon the influence of the production process on the nature and meaning of everyday objects. For them, getting the job right implied not only the economic ownership of machines and resources, but also the technical mastery of the work instead of being the machine’s slave.

Again the idea that people are slaves to machines is a bit missing the mark for me. If you feel like a slave definitely warning signals maybe see if there is a rich white man nearby and pay close attention to what he is doing.

But while a computer programmer, by having the right to adjust software, can feel in control, every other ‘power user’ with the same rights, is practically blown away by the explosion of procedures, formats and processes she is confronted with.

Yes totally. Interview between OSP and Dmitri Kleiner.

“It is not this or that… machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny which oppresses the lives of all of us.” William Morris. Art and Its Producers, and The Arts and Crafts of To-day: Two Addresses Delivered Before the National Association for the Advancement of Art. Longmans & Co., London, 1901.

I guess this might be where Colm got his thesis title from.

a clever use of software is often wrongfully considered as craftsmanship

John Maeda, Design by Numbers. I disagree, of course software can be your tool (and you can be good at it (and you can make cool things as an amateur (and not everything needs to be perfect))). You dont need to be a piano builder to be a pianist. It's definitely my approach and obviously the approach that this article is encouraging, but a bit dismissive of other people's practices to say this is the only way to be good at your craft. What if my material as a musician is not the physical piano but the rhythms it can make or the audience or the repetoire or my own sanity. Or at very least, even if intimate knowledge of the tools is essential, that would prove to me that all these other things are just a essential.

we need to avoid a tunnel vision of technology where practices, conditions and perspectives can and must be pushed aside to enable a sense of control.#

Through cutting a comfortably coherent slice out of the unruly entity that software is, you might miss the opportunity to engage with it in other ways than as a means to an end. Software is source code, but also an interface which, whether graphic or not, represents a particular interaction with the underlying processes. Groups of users gather around certain applications and thereby create patterns of use that make sense of this interaction. Mailing lists and documentation on software are characterized by a specific language and tone, as is the way software developers converse with each other and their users. When we consider software as culture, it is perhaps possible to drop the rhetoric of master and slave, and we can begin to think about how ‘competence’ can mean more than ‘control’.

<3

Adobe makes every effort to push the simulations and algorithms, the monstrous machinery, that define the software, into the background.

Add-folder-to-workspace

I mean its still software installed on my computer.

but with admin permissions its fine

Some of the files for sure look like gibberish but that would happen if I looked at an open source program too. I get that I'm only editing some presets, but I'm kinda curious to see how customisable this tool is. Is that really the issue here.

Evangelists credited on line 9.

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Legal exceptions to this include private use and the right to quote from a work.

Is modifying software for your own use in breach of copyright? Is posting screenshots of Adobe code on the internet in breach of copyright?

“A sane person”, says Zeno, “doesn’t analyse himself, doesn’t look in the mirror”

it is important that imperfections remain visible so that users feel inspired to report them or do something about them.

Some people feel responsible to make imperfections visible? Others feel overwhelmed by the imperfections everywhere.

The obligatory use of open standards is the last but not least reason for processes being more explicit in FLOSS. Far from being normalised, they often cause obstructions in the publishing workflow where documents are sent back and forth between authors, designers and printers. The risk of a possible incompatibility compels us to warn, to explain and to be alert during each moment of the process. Conversions are never flawless.

Conversions are never flawless.

Taking doubt into account implies breaking with the natural ‘flow’ of things and accepting the hitches that aren’t always that easy to deal with. It is in this way we have started to understand the importance of performing our practice publicly because it brings out unusual gestures that break with the appeasing elegance of the typical self-assured designer who has everything sorted.

Designers are infallible creative geniuses and their machines are crappy evil glitchy broken? Or breaking the software helps to see the broken humans behind it?

While a familiar gesture is one that fits perfectly well in a generally accepted model, an awkward gesture is a movement that is not completely synchronic. It’s not a countermovement, nor a break from the norm; it doesn’t exist outside of the pattern, nor completely in it. Like a moiré effect reveals the presence of a grid, awkward behaviour can lead to a state of increased awareness; a form of productive insecurity that presents us with openings that help understand the complex interaction between skills, tools and medium.

Throughout our practice we are looking for forms of reflection that can do without comfortable distance. We use our awkwardness as a strategy to cause interference, to create pivotal moments between falling and moving, an awkward in-between that makes space for thinking without stopping us to act.