User:Tancre/2/project proposal 3

Draft 2

What do you want to make?
My final outcome would be an online digital fiction exploring the evolution of my thoughts, my experiences, and my experiments, during this academic year in a science-fiction narrative. Following the idea of my previous project 'A text within a map, a map within a text', I will develop a series of small experiments related to the main topic of my thesis: consciousness and software. In particular:

• how our consciousness can be explored from a subjective and objective point of view to develop a consciousness of the self (self-consciousness).
• how software, instead of being idealized as human-like beings, helps to develop this self-consciousness by giving the possibility to explore and build worlds projecting our ideas and observing them critically.

The homepage will contain an introduction and a series of possible actions to move in the 'narrative'.
The actions will be presents in all the narrative in the form of links:

• links to other pages of the project
• links inside the same page but in parts not immediately visualized
• links to parallel windows
• links to force you to escape from the narrative into external pages

The story will not be totally linear giving the possibility to explore it freely as a sort of game.
It will have different levels of reading:

• inside the window (explicit text)
• inside the HTML code (1st level)
• inside the CSS and Javascript code (2nd level)
• external files (3rd level)
• hidden or encrypted messages (4th level)

It will contain different contents, from music to video to texts and so on...
It is important to me to highlight that is my world and to explore it you need to be really interested in it.
Who enters with a superficial approach will be rejected outside of the site, so who is really interested can come back and chose a new path.

The experiments embedded in the experience could be other websites (part of the narrative), videos, images, music and so on.. There will from 30 to 50 small projects plus collateral content that will be grouped by their thematics but that could be explored as separate parts of the narrative. Furthermore, the projects could be, unfinished or just ideas, reflecting my struggle to understand what I'm doing and why and the necessity to change the way if not enough strong.

The experiments will touch different parts of this discourse following my personal evolution and my personal understanding of them. Right now I have:

• hackpact 1 > experiment to visualize all the parts of a software together
• hackpact 2 > explorations of software as agents (early AI)+ how to visualize software
  • 2.1 > clippy
  • 2.2 > ELIZA
  • 2.3 > Git Stalker
• hackpact 3 > liminal space between the code and its visualization + others
  • 3.1 Unspatial spaces
  • 3.2 DOM Annihilator
  • 3.3 Infinite spaces
  • 3.4 Auto Scrolling
  • 3.5 Tag's Highlighter

The science-fiction narrative can be as:

• narrator (overall situation)
• captains' log of a spaceship (with a date)
• eventually, there could be a technical explanation of the projects by the engineer of the spaceship
• other characters
• free thoughts

Example of the captain's log: Captain's Log, stardate 2263.2.
I shouldn't have gone so far from the X system. The controls are malfunctioning, my research for meaning is pushing me at the edges of the known universe. This part of the space is cold and inhospitable, the stars are less shiny than ever. I have to decide if to continue in this direction or explore another galaxy, but now I can't go back anymore to my home planet. Not without an answer.

The narrative will not have an end, the research doesn't stop, and possibly it will continue. In the future, I could expand it.

How do you plan to make it?
What is your timetable?
Why do you want to make it?

Who can help you and how?
Michael / Aymeric / Andre / Alex
Steve / Florian / ...others

Relations to previous practice

• the dot - infinite space
• wittgenstein's tractatus - language maze
• a map within a text (SI8) - infinite space and interface to map the mind
• thoughts on the book's condition in the digital age (SI9) - 'living text' and 'in-timeness' of the book as extension of a static world of the mind into a dynamic and interactive one

Relations to a larger context
- Software studies
- Artificial intelligence
- Post-autonomia
- Existentialism
- software art / net art / poetic software

Relevant projects
I/O/D - web stalker > for the alternative visualization of a website and its approach in parallel through a software
Weizenbaum - ELIZA > for the therapeutic-psychoanalytical approach and the interaction which triggers you to question if the machine you are interacting with is alive. [This aliveness question is the vector of the human experience here directed to the AI, while I want it to direct to the user]