Re: [-empyre-] real vs unreal

[jesis@xs4all.nl]

hi,


Just some thoughts after getting into reading mode again (I skip lots of
lists these days), the words about the real caught my attention...

First: at DEAF symposium this year themed Data Knitting the focus was on
the archive. This last (unvoluntarily?) choice somehow confused me,
especially since many of the speakers started talking about networks as
"archives of the real". I thought that was stretching the definition of
the word archive a bit far, and also clouding the experience of
networking, of the flow of it. Of course every archive somehow archives
the real, but here the thought seemed very much centered on 'now-ness' or
some kind of experience of real time movements of all sorts. I tried to
find out what they meant with 'the real', but DeLanda the moderator got in
the way by explaining for the speaker that "the real is the bullet
entering your head"(DEAF was shortly after the start of the Irak war).
Finally the explanation of what exactly was meant with archiving the real
was extremely fuzzy and unclear. It seems as if there is confusion about
the real. To some it points at a kind of hyper reality tv experience,
which is somehow skattered and devided into many small pieces in new
media. To others the real is only that which is physical. It is with the
latter that the problems seem to start.

It looks like we are still suffering from the Descartian problem, the idea
that there is a difference or clear border between material and immaterial
experience, between mind and body. I don't think it is possible to come to
an agreement on the issue whether such a divide exists or not. Personally
I think there is no divide, that mind and body are one. To me, so called
VR experiences are real too.

Secondly I would like to support something Alan Sondheim wrote about the
physicality of new media by quoting from a publication about the
preservation of new media art, made by the Guggenheim and the Langlois
Foundation. In it Bruce Sterling writes :"Very little materiality, is
very, very far from no materiality at all. Total immateriality is
metaphysical illusion; it has nothing to do with physics or engineering.
It's exhilirating to watch these heaps of data vanishing into microscopic
scales, and if it's doubling every 18 months-hey everything in
computerland wants to double every 18 months-then it looks like it's going
to totally vaporize, just any second now. But it never does. Never. Even
vapor is material. Mass and energy are conserved in an Einsteinian
universe, so things just don't "immaterialize". Forget about it." To just
emphasize the physicality and 'real-ness' of information and data and
everything happening around and with it.


My two cents. Back to the autumnal storm and work.


J
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