Re: [-empyre-] Welcome Jim Andrews re: Electronic Poetry

[Simon Biggs <simon@littlepig.org.uk>]

On 06.05.03 08:36, "fizzion" <fizzion@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

>> It is something to do with my own artistic agenda. I am not interested in
>> people interacting with machines - or even art. I am interested in how
>> people interact with one another and thus bring themselves into being. Of
>> course, this can be done remotely and that is what happens when people
>> interact with one another via an artwork. In that instance you have author
>> and reader interacting.
>> 
>> My interest has always been in shifting these roles around and key to this
>> is creating a situation where everyone is interacting with everyone else,
>> all at the same time. To blur the roles of author/reader you also have to
>> de-differentiate the individual.
-----
> So, a hive mind or a gang bang, collective conciousness? (collective
> unconcious?) To what end? To dissolve boundaries, barriers, to ease
> discovery, self discovery, discover nature of being, heighten awareness of
> the other. 'Bringing themselves into being' interests me. Here is something
> that has preoccupied many many people for a long time.
-----
Not an hive mind, nor some sort of variation on Gaia. I am suggesting that
people are literally instances of language, that the individual exists in so
far as they can be differentiated through how they relate to others within
the networks of communication and signification/poesis that bind us as an
organism to the collective. To some extent this is simply taking Foucault's
idea of the relationship between people, society and language at face value
and applying it to the dynamics of communication and its relationship to
ontology. If Derrida is correct in asserting that the reader is the writer
then some sort of thinking along these lines functions to reconcile the
ontological conundrums that emerge.

> It occurs to me that with your idea of 'how people interact with one another
> and thus bring themselves into being' that music might be a good vehicle.
> Improvisation in a group or on the web.
> My son plays Diablo II on the web, players help each other, give advice etc
> in this incredible melee of skeletons and ogres and blood etc. Effectively
> avatars but in an author defined role.
-----
Communicating is what people do best and like doing the most. It defines
them. This is a simpler way of saying what I am trying to say above. It is
no surprise that the biggest killer application for computing was the net
(the convergence of communications and computing) and the most successful
applications on the net have been those concerned with communicating
(instance ourselves at this moment doing what we are doing on this
list-serve). We are communicating, creating ourselves and the collective(s)
we belong to.

> Merton was talking about solitude in 'The Power and Meaning of Love'.
> Here's the full quote in case you are interested:
-----
My favourite book on solitude is Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy. In
this he argues that when we are totally alone we cease to exist except in
the eyes of God. His argument is predicated on the idea that we exist only
as social beings. He wrote this 1600 years ago and so today, in an age that
is somewhat more sceptical, it seems acceptable to drop the last bit of his
assumption and accept we cease to exist, full stop.

best

Simon


Simon Biggs

simon@littlepig.org.uk
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
http://www.greatwall.org.uk/
http://www.babel.uk.net/

Research Professor
Art and Design Research Centre
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
s.biggs@shu.ac.uk
http://www.shu.ac.uk/