[-empyre-] rhythm and a.life

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

now we have had a rest after that post fest of the last few weeks which
covered diverse areas like the nature and renderings of space itself, 3d
games in opposition to 3d art, creating narratives within virtual
enviromnments, the cultural specificity of 3d art, and few more things..

i'd like to pick up on some of the questions which have arizen and gotten
lost ...

Roya asked:
- Real time objects have aura. What about virtual objects?
and
Ayoub was talking about  virtual environments as reactive organisms - ie
sensing data to
generating a "living" world.

these two intertwined questions remind me a little of our discussion with
Teri Rueb and Brett Stalbaum a few months ago on GPS data.. and
represenattion and  the nature of reality itself.. is data real? does it
have inherent qualities  -fixed meanings, or is it like an elementic
particle that can fit many different combinations.
and if data is real (whatever real is) and then we use that  data to create
another reality..like John Klima uses real tiem military info to create his
Great Game,  and as Ayoub is talking about generating 3D environments  by
real-time data , or Simon Biggs  work which  translates the accepted reality
of the already abstracted dewy decimal system into another  spaciality. then
i wonder are we creating new space and new real and new life from that
data..?

Pesce (co inventer of VRML with Tony Parisi) who of course now has a
different tack , used to say that writing vrml was like being God...it was
magical and invocational.. and we all snickered.. but when we as users
inhabit those worlds we are in a sense inside a living pulsing organism..,
bathing in its data flow, reponding to its gravity. it might be computer
generated..(and i'm not referencing matrix2) but hey isnt our body just a
vast amalgum  of hardware colonies that runns materially embedded software
programs allowing us to interface with the world outside our skin..

and just how do you define aura,  the invisible thing outside the skin of a
human or object.. .. is it a  material property?..is it a vibrational
effect..? or an electrical charge.? i remember doing a shiatsu course years
ago where we had to sense auras on bodies and plants and seem to recall that
it also could also be indicated by changes in  temperature? is it associated
with commodity value.. eg the aura of wealth?

electronic works have all of these.. they do generate their own charge,
rhythm, glow, hype, uniqueness, value.  the users are also uniquely
generating a vibration or rhythm within them....every users keystroke or
mouse rhythm is like a digital signature. even as a list  we have created
our own  flow and fluctuation this month so far.. generated our own life
world data breath ..
(- = 1 post, rows are days of the month)
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obviously i don't have enough to do  if i can do that graph.. but hey what i
really want to ask is
are 3d environemnts only alive when a user is in them.. do they become liek
a recessive gene when sitting on the server waiting for human presence to
activate them.. that gets almost into gender politics doesnt it..the
passivity of the space (or the potential of the void)  waiting for (hu)man
to give it life...

melinda