[-empyre-] TransCartesian space and mapping paradigms

["Patrick Lichty" <voyd@voyd.com>]

The conversation goes:
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.

> 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?

Please excuse my fuzziness of thought - I've been on a work binge, and have
had four hours of sleep per night for nearly a week.

The passage that caught my eye was:
"which are not word (or page)- based, which are not dependant on language."
As a fist note, (and i won't expand on this), I don't agree with the goal of
media technologies as an externalization of mind.  I think that with VR, we
have found that it constantly comes up short until we have a neural HCI.
Therefore, interpretation and interface becomes a point of contention.

Back to the first point duplicated above the Net does and does not extend
infinitely.  As an epistemological (and probably ontological) space, the
Internet is gigantic, with its associations and sheer wealth of information
(which is not to be confused with knowledge).  And physically, it expands
across the First World, and increasingly across the rest of the globe.  Bu
to me the only physicality that the Net has is through its tie to the
physical through the interconnection of people.  Therefore, the Web, or Net
is probably a good metaphor to use.

One of the largest misconceptions that I think people have is that the Net
(and I make this distinction to encompass the broader set of funcions beyond
the Web) is not a space at all in the formal sense.  This comes from
Gibsonian cyberspatial metaphors (among others) that allow us to grasp the
idea of what the Net represents. However, the Net is an abstract information
construct that incorporates a dizzying array of data structures, so much so
that we have to inscribe anthropic frames around this data so that we can
properly distill it, but then that's basic HCI.

However, I digress. The idea of 'texts', and I expand the idea of text to
include any body of narrative information that includes media lexia and an
association map to create an epistemological arc, in online 'spaces, and I
use this metaphor to deinfe a field of representational data for
human/computational interpretation in a 'text' has been of great interest to
me in the past decade.

For that decade, My work has gone from what I call 'concurrent media' which
is different than multimedia in that it is multimodal, operating through
both physical, digital, & broadcast media _at the same time_ to 'cognitive
ladders', an overblown term for several parallel narratives that intertwine
in a single nonlinear text, to associative mapping, in which context for any
given idea in a 'text' (which can contain sound, video, type, and even now
tactile information) is dynamic, and centers its frame of context,
reconfiguring the entire composition with every interaction.

For reference, in 2-5 years, I'd like to start playing with dynamic
association mapping, but for now, my brain hurts enough with static mapping
strategies.)

But this idea of texts that are not dependent on language goes back to the
concurrent media idea.  My 'grasping at bits' piece was something that
allowed for a text that was not dependent on linear structures, or even
static ones, but it was still text-based.

However, the goal (eventually) was to create symbolic, associative
literature that used media, type, sound and touch ( I seem to be one fo the
few trying to use force feedback for web-based communication) to create a
nonlinear lierature structure that still holds together through the
metastructure of the map (dynamic or static).

But this idea of getting beyond language is full of limitations. Although
Chomsky's early linguistics had it's problems, I think that as soon as one
maps a discursive structure of any sort, a grammar is created, and reflects
either a global or local sense of deep structure.  Humans are symbolic
manipulators; that's the way we're wired.  To assume that there can be
spaces without TEXTUAL language may be an interesting thought, but it will
still have a sort of grammar in the way it is arranged and represents
meaning.  To go beyond this is to suggest a space without communicative
power or structure, tha this is not interesting to me.

Secondly, any computational 'space' as field of information cannot escape
language, for the whole of the Net is constructed of languages as digital
codes. So if you create a space without language, you create it with codes,
which are part of another type pf language and grammar.

Pardon me, but I'm fallign asleep;  I'm going to pick this up in a few
hours.