[-empyre-] re: 'bidimensionality":net spaces beyond Cartesian axes

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

>> (something that will go beyond
>>> simple navigationable 3d), one in which the bi-dimensionality of the
>> printed
>>> word will be reinvented.
>> in trying to create spaces which are not word (or page)- based,
>> which are not dependant on language. I have tried with metal and flesh to
>> rethink the relationship of words to spaces but I sometimes feel, doing
>> that, that I'm trying to go beyond myself (in a painful kind of way). The
>> software, the hardware are not the problems (they are limitations to play
>> with, to overcome). My own brain structure is.
>> And that is why, Metal and Flesh is as visual and musical as it is. It is a
>> way to try to get beyond the printed word, the bi-dimensional word

hi

Perhaps a glance towards Derrida's playful excursions into the nature of
frame (parergon) would be helpful:  we know that the page, the screen, sets
up an artificial, read linguistic, context of meaning, suggesting a reading
of a book, or the perception of a painting inside a frame.  And yet doesn't
the net seem to have an infinite extent beyond or inside the little frame we
can see and navigate?  Ollivier, I am interested in what seems to be a
subtle shift in intent from your first desire aboutthe bi-dimensionality of
the printed word, that this bi-dimensionality will be "reinvented"; and the
second, about going "beyond" the printed word, the bimensional word.  Does
one have to, in some way, surpass the text in order to return to it, like a
prodigal?  I think not, because text is already flowing within a nonlinear
ubiquitous visual culture, no matter what place we live in physically or
mentally.  The landscape of dreams merges with the physical topography of
place through the mediation of the framed moving and still images that are
everywhere.  Text is already dissipated and resurgent within the sea of
electronica.  To start with, think about the screen upon which a text, even
a closely reasoned essay such as those in metalandflesh, appear.  When I
imagine 'bidimensionality' with regard to a netbased text, the first
condition  conjured up by this geometry, is the square of my monitor that
purports to imitate the convention of the tv screen, or if you have one of
those new flat panel displays from mac, so-called'cinema' or 'studio'
displays.  So perhaps we could agree that as you see text on the screen you
see a visual analogy to the book, to the tv, to the cinema, at least these
three, for starters. That means that the moment you put text into
dreamweaver, into html, into the space of the net, you have, simultaneously
and effortlessly, conjured up three layers of typology of display.  At least
three frames, none of which contain the whole meaning of the text.  I think
that the reinvention you hope for is already a fact, indeed a condition of
our cultural perception, seasoned as we are by these multivalent modes of
visual communication.  To say nothing of the wonderful efficacy in netbased
text to suggest a kind of voicing....  Particularly in chairetmetal, I feel
this kind of disembodied, or partially embodied, natural voice that comes
across through abstraction ( music fragments in Flash) simultaneously with
the logocentric abstraction of the visual text.  The rather austere
sensibility in the design of the site--color, linear finesse, a kind of
Gregorian chant musicality--induces a kind of reverie or reflection on the
nature of text.  Text does remain at the core, but text without two
dimensions, or even three coordinates xyz, just by being suffused by or
subsumed into  this ambigous virtual landscape.

Christina