Re: [-empyre-] rhythm and a.life

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, Melinda Rackham wrote:

> 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..
>
Just wanted to say no to this - for one thing - the hardware is the
software is the wetware is the mindware - for another there's no "x
running y" - for another the "the world outside our skin" is also inside -
interiors are highly problematic, given the nature of tacit knowledge and
prostheses - and for another - I'm not sure what "hardware colonies" are -
unless you're referencing something like Minsky's society of mind -

Finally - inhabitation occurs across all sorts of worlds, including that
of the novel - which in an odd way is a lot more generative since words
are only catalystic in the visual -

> 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
>
- They're not alive in any case. Human interaction does give them life for
that matter, any more than rollerblades "come to life" when someone's out
skating. It's a matter of function and reception -

Alan -