[-empyre-] chocoate mousse

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

hi empyreans


let me serve a rich (or just) dessert

so, the thing is, the space of net art is simultaneous, it is the paradox of
multiple events dissovlving into one another as soon as the simultaneity is
noticed, like play, like paradoxes of fictions (ficciones, see
Borges!)...you can never get at one place, into one time: its the
intertextuality of all the components, languages looping, you can never find
your way to the end of the thread to the end of the trail, you can never
say, "meanwhile, back at the ranch," because "back at the ranch" something
else simultaneously is dissolving:  so, instead there is a logic of play at
the heart of netbased art.  net art is a  paradox since it has to do with
the interaction of events and is emergent in that interaction as a third,
forth or nth integer event (to paraphrase  susan stewart, Nonsense:  Aspects
of iNTertextualiy in folkore and LIterature, Hopkins up 1979) What I meant
by digital sublime is not by any means something cold or beautiful or pretty
or Malevich-supremecistoid or even technologically sterile.  Rather it is
the zero ground, the absolute zero, the event horizon (cf Dyens in
chairetmetal) on the net.  Every html or vrml display is a threshold
(baudelaire)  towards a undisclosed, simultaneously dissolving and reforming
zone.  with "naxsmash" i want to play around with the smash effect:  entropy
keeps happening, we try to set and reset the boundaries of things, fix
things, set coordinates, sail to the island of the day before (Umberto Eco).
This island:  We can approach it but will never reach it, this place of
ultimate meaning, or knowing, just as you can never reach the speed of
light.  ( Think of Einstein's general theory of relativity. ) It's the
place/time we can't go to because of the time and space dissolve of net art.
It's the giant baby in the white room (Kubrick, 2001).   Imagine 'sublime'
is 'utopian', because the world of artistic production in the net is without
a fixed time context: it can only be experienced and reconstituted through
the creation of multiple domains. Sublimity is just the unseen, the
unknowable, the repressed memory content, the 'awful' precisely because it
is 'hors de combat', out of the running, back of beyond, an unrealizable
possibility.  Is it possible to define perameters, to navigate precise
coordinates for exactly what mez's hypertextual layering 'means' any more
than what Finnegans Wake 'means'?  Of course not because the
intertextualities are themselves the body, they are not representations of
some transcendent order beyond themselves, they are just, gloriously,
themselves, live.  incarnation:  Nabokov's Ada and Van are their own texts.
Here's where the intertextuality of the net both thwarts and enriches
epistemology.  It's not that we can engineer a kind of knowing like
scientific 'truth' via the technologies of the net.  The kinds of knowing,
or epistemologic, constructs capable of flourishing  in this simultaneous
noplace-land are creations of our own play.  Thus to me the technobody of a
netart work is a delicious double memmory package, it is the me of MEZ:
"me" goes to "z" (z=ultimate alphabet).  Anna Livia Plurabelle cries as she
slipstreams into the Liffey at the end/beginning of the Wake:  mememorme!
is this "me me more me"; or is this "(re)member me!".  Luckily it is
both/and:  bidimensionality of text.  So it is that digital media become
performances: plays.  Joseph, in your studio, when you enjoy the physicality
of your digitally mediated canvasses, their simultaneous presences and
absences, perhaps you might imagine (imagining equalling being after all)
that you are engaged in a digital performance, a series of plays between the
place of 'physical' and the time of 'memory'.  Things dissolve:  the genres
blur in a playground of performance whose boundaries are arbitrary in
relation to what is enclosed within them, yet definitive and examinable at
each instance of performance.  Each moment of each html.  Each breath taken
while luxuriating in the digitally mastered caress of Madonna's voice, to
echo Brian Howell-- or Bjork's (my favorite) in " medias res."  I luxuriate
in the space of net art as a cyborg digital double, it is me, my memory, it
is no-me, it's no-memory (see valery grancher), it is a to z, it is
intertextual simultaneous no-context invisible cities (Calvino) : each
place, each moment is nested inside a cache of multiplicities,
multiply-cities.

Christina McPhee