User:Cristinac/Annotations1504

Lexia to Perplexia

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

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

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

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

Keynotes: simulation environment,