[-empyre-] Re: when marcel sniffed madeliene

[r200@ihug.com.au]

> hi empyreans
> 
> 
>When marcel sniffed the Madeleine

Being a reconstructed deconstructionist I thought I had left behind in the 20th 
century names like Deleuze, Gautteri, Derrida and Foucalt.
Please do we constantly need to build these baroque castles of theory. 
When the actual artworks we are discussing fail to match their theoretical 
constructs. The net VR and cyber space are very new, for some reason artists 
are attracted to these new technologies. Not wishing to be too negative, these 
technologies have a social and political dimension. Nobody seems willing to 
talk about this, plaything of a highly educated elite, sitting at their 
computer screens.

Perhaps it is pertinent that the number of people connected to the net has 
started to fall. Still like all the other artists I dream of the 
potentialities. However I quake at the need to learn yet another technology, as 
the layers between me and the production of the object become more entenuated. 
Maybe this is a good thing. However it occurs to me that like cinema cyber art, 
vr and the net art will be a team effort.

What is the digital space?
Bi dimensionality. Bio dimensionality, tripping through space and time, the 
digital space to me is one where is there is a difference in scale, backwards 
and forwards in history, travelling over continents, other planets a Tibetan 
Buddhists view of closely related dimensions, worlds without end. 
Memory is the key to our narratives, stories, and fictions, art? It is useful 
that new research has discovered more about memory. VR and the net are more 
like the way memory functions than anything else we have ever invented. In some 
ways the net is a mnemonic device were knowledge is represented symbolically, 
like a medieval cathedral which was used to remember vast chunks of knowledge 
before books became common.
Various stations around the cathedral were used to represent blocks of 
knowledge this way an individual could remember much more. Perhaps links on the 
net form a similar function these links form a way of knowing theoretically. 
The whole world could be reduced to a page of links. So texts become a mere 
symbol. A mnemonic for something else.

"Memory itself is constructed rather than retrieved from storage in its 
original pristine form." (Levine and Friedman 1998)
"Memory is not recorded but seems, to be stored in a highly complex manner 
consisting of impressions ideas and feelings filtered through our own belief 
system. Each time some one reaches for a memory, it is not played back but 
reconstructed, for this reason no memory is ever repeated exactly the same way 
twice. Furthermore, according to researchers as time goes by, memories are 
modified to fit the beliefs of the society and the world around us."( Randle 
,Estes and Cones 1999.

What are the possibilities of this?

Wandering further down this lane, all sorts of information is stored in 
different parts of the brain, just like the net. In the vr world a tree is no 
longer a tree, or a painting of a tree, it is all trees, the first tree, the 
tree I saw that day in summer in 1985,the tree that van gogh painted, the tree 
the goddard filmed etc, etc. this is the potential of the cyber tree.

My believe is that like our brain all this stuff in vr land, terracyberrus, the 
net is the realm of the unconscious Jung's universal unconscious which for the 
first time we can tap into, explore, construct. This is the birthplace of mems 
and memories inventions.
Surfing this ocean throws up strange creatures such as the giant cat, 
supposedly the result of drinking water from a nuclear reactor, or the face of 
Jesus in the smoke of the world trade center. Just like the absurd irony, 
monsters and dislocation in the real unconcious. for instance why do all game 
designers live in a constructed world of industrial gothic. Why do I spend half 
my life searching the minutiae on the surface of mars.
Painting still seems compellingly attractive.

Cheers arturo