Re: [-empyre-] real vs unreal

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

Re: Your last paragraph - I agree with it; I also find great joy in it.

On a 'dumb' level - in vr, one might argue that the screen, pixels, are
part and parcel of the material substrate of a particular representation.
And this is concrete - there are scanning issues, frequency issues, color
mapping issues, and so forth -

Alan

On Wed, 8 Oct 2003 jesis@xs4all.nl wrote:

> 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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