[-empyre-] A narrative genetics of Net

[Terry Hargrave <thargrav@alum.mit.edu>]

This post is from Christina

The elusive morphing of bi-dimensionality in texts into--something we  are
trying to  push into potentiality  (Melinda's phrase) makes me wonder about
a nonlinear narrative genetics

Patrick observes the net
> As an epistemological (and probably ontological) space--

Here is a fresh look at 'bidimensionality':   intersection of  these two,
at the crosshairs, of   what it is to know and what it is to be.  Net is
more than code, though code driven; as analogized in biological terms, the
code genome expresses a constantly morphing , evolutionary structure .  This
structure is, as it were, a life  phenomenon of a parasitic  sort:  it has
limited self awareness, it 'knows' , it  seeks reproduction through its
viral relationship with us, the human cultural host.  (for these metaphors
thanks to Ollivier's Metal and Flesh...mine a crude approximation of his
narrative).   And:   What sort of reproduction? In what ontology?    but the
whole notion of copying is so interesting,   clearly we are no longer
exclusively in Benjamin's age of mechanical reproduction, though we still
are partly.   Patrick notes the net's potential towards
>  associative mapping, in which cont ext 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.

Associative mapping is like the disease vectors in animal and human hosts:
replicating, moving through, transforming the host, transforming itself in a
continual dynamic..  The analogy becomes this:  reproduction is to
associative mapping  as copy is to mutation.    (see Melinda's vrml work_)


Christina McPhee
<http://www.naxsmash.net>