[-empyre-] Texts as fodder

[Patrick Lichty <voyd@voyd.com>]

I'm going to be rather broad as I've been reading a large number of posts, 
and don't feel I can give them justice without going on for pages.

What I see happening here is a discussion relating to a number of threads, 
among these being textual synaesthesia, the word or letter/symbol as 
representational form for computation aesthetics, multimedia poesis, 
computational autopoesis, and so on.

Two issues that I would like to take up would be textual symbology as 
aesthetic/poetic gesture and the cognitive ordering of meaning in virtual 
spaces.  This is necessarily reducing the conversation to a binary wich is 
hopelessly reductive, but I wnat o draw a contrast for uses of discusision.

From this vantage point, there are a number of works such as Bookchin's 
Invader, Arteriods, and even more basic pieces such as Alphabot that huse 
the textual symbol as a representational practice that is more indicative 
of the multimedia piece and less indicative of metanarrative.  To me, this 
is a gesture of using textual signification as a form of computational 
aesthetics, than constructor of (meta)narrative.  And of course, sunch 
computation itself is based on symbolic operations, to do so draws 
interesting correlations between a Chomsky-esque deep structure between 
human linguistics and , as Hayles would put it, the multiple layers of 
symbolic interpretation between the basic operational structure of 
computation and the higher interpretative level of HCI.  To do so, IMO, is 
to consider the parallels of representation between human and machine 
interpretation and the discontinuities relating to textual HCI.

I would like to add to the fray that I don't see quite so many people 
dealing with metanarrative in online spaces, such as how larger narrative 
structures  are constructed in the online.  Of interest to me are pieces 
like Rackham's, Amerika's, LIttle's Body Without Organs.  One of the big 
challenges to the construction of online narrative is how cognition, which 
may change in mode, but does not alter so much in structure as shown in The 
Art of HCI, Creative Cognition, and a bit in Digital Mantras, allows the 
construction of meaning in the virtual.  THis has been a big interest to me 
since 1990, from the building of alternate structures through concurrent 
media  for pedagogy, distributed/multimodal narratives (Connecticut 
College, 2000, used 3-walled projection, browser-based, 
environmental/haptic sensors and VR interfaces to access a single 
narrative), to associative narratives like the Plumb ThinkMap technology 
(which I could never get the relational databases running in).

Therefore I ask what are the differences between operating on various 
scales, if any, and how does this alter the construction of 
narrative?  Also, does the online/virtual actually allow for rich new 
methodologies of the construction of narrative through techniques such as 
virtual terrains(VR), associative mindmapping, Augmented Reality overlays, 
or multimodal representations?  Or, ore we deluding ourselves and should go 
back to a book? (just a polemic, friends)

I'm being brief as I'm writing a lot today, but I hope that this serves as 
a kick to the flywheel.
I'll be interested in hearing what you all have to say.