[-empyre-] superficiality and immersion

["Melinda Rackham" <melinda@unsw.edu.au>]

ollivier
thank you  for your statement and the great links
it sparked me off on lots of tangents..but i'll start with
superficiiality..

One must be
> superficial if one is to survive today. In an encyclopedic type society,
> where knowledge comes from deep and thorough understanding of information,
> where information is generated slowly, superficiality is something to be
> avoided. But in a society where information, phenomena, actions,
reactions,
> events and histories are overabundant, over produced and over analyzed,
one
> must be superficial if one is to comprehend what is going on.

i recall reading several years ago that a daily edition of  the ny times
contained
more information to process  than a person in the  middle ages was forced
to confront in thier whole lives.. now while i dont think you can do direct
comparisons like thats as it excludes the perhpas more vertical connection
or even webbedness a person of another era would have with thier
environment  that we dont have today.. but it was a good comparison as i
guess i tend to think the info i deal with is "normal" and continuous.
 but  if technology is a biological/technological  adaptation to the
information overload which has simultaneously grown with the growth of the
human race.. and that generates the idea
that we need to be more interrested in surface than depth these days to make
sense
of the world... is that saying that depth is not a useful or desirable
evolutionary survival tool anymore ? or is that coming from the tradition of
the gaze, the stare, the look.? im not sure superficiality and deepth have
to be played against each other.. rather are they complimantary elements of
comprehension and naviagtion?

i visualise the web as a 3d plane
 the revalued x axis of horizontal superficial distance,
the y axis of vertical depths of knowledge and
the z axis..the axis through the body, the axis of conscious immersion.
perhpas what im seeing is a different pattern that emerges in the way we
think  in conjunction with techniology..so it is more frenetic as it seeks
the surface connections, but its dependent on all the axies... like a 3d
sizemic chart, except the horizontal lines fan out along many planes..or a
3d version of those erratic spider web patterns when they give them caffine,
or a neural net where everything is connected and affects everything else.
perhaps this is the "volume" youtalk about..


Interesting
> net art websites treat the text as something to be perceived instead of
> read, as something to be "felt" and experienced and not as something to
> focus on. Net art websites truly understand that the web is an
environment,
> something that has volume (intellectual, informational and emotional) and
> that one must build one's thought and reflection within this volume. When
> surfing these websites, you are left alone to find your way, to create
your
> path, to gather your own information, to process your own understanding.
And
> that, to me, is the essence of the web.
>
i agree the web is wonderfully filmic, and as a content creator i am always
forward planning to a narrative
point, a camera stop (especially vrml viewpoints) or a pathway through the
garden that we want to
lead the partticipant down, up or along , however subtly it is markered.. .
but with the realisation that the viewer is in control of their experience,
the viewer chooses the perspective.

and i do think that the global technological information overload has lead
to a sensory deprivation in the world, perhaps this is where i connect with
what you say again about the web being a feeling space, a place where we do
sensory naviatation. its interrresting that a lot of people who have been
round the web for a while are being drawn to 3d spaces.. they dont want to
just look and process text, which is already a virtual experience, they do
want to felt, and immerse and connect in another plane. my vision for the
future is similar to yours.. sort of along the lines of mark pesce's
original vision of the web as a labryinth of connected 3dspaces, rather than
the html version of the web which was designed to share text documents,
which dominates today .

melinda

(just as an aside its also difficult to operate in academic instutions which
value the encylopaedic tradition)