RE: [-empyre-] LANGUAGE, STEREOCENA, SPACES, INTERNET

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

> what i was trying to say [thinking out loud here, sorry] was that
> maybe when
> you put this things into an interface and into a medium where language(as
> common symbols of a culture) is no more *the important* thing because your
> work will end up on the screen of people that even don´t know where your
> country is, nor your idiom, etc.
> Then is when you begin to re-think the way of communicating things, and to
> think in the way interfaces work, and the way to reach to a visually and
> interactively/more_inmersive (even playfull) solution.

I am curious, Brian, if this means that where language *does* benefit from
synthesis with interface is primarily in English? Is English the primary
language benefitting from such instersticial/facial syntheses? How does that
work, do you think? Do you think other languages 'profit' as much as English
in the rethinkings of language that accompany digital art?

Yes, internationality of association on the Net is certainly an inducement
to other language, isn't it, where the common language is interfacial. I
write in English, but several of the interfaces I've made are but minimal in
the nessessity for much knowledge of english, and this is arrived at not so
much by a desire to go there as a desire to have the interactivity and
interface do as much of the 'talking' as seems appropriate to their capacity
for information transfer; usually the interfaces originally had much more
language in them.

Regina quoted aLe: "the secret is in the cheese the cat just seedling the
color"

Interesting review of "The Magic Rat" by aLe, Regina!

Your review and Brian's comments prompted me to revisit
http://www.eale.hpg.com.br/2002/rat . The cat isn't so much after the mouse
or the cheese as what's on the table, is it. The cheese is for the mouse.
And what is on the table? Language, image, a globe, and different
near-conventional looking cursors (which turn out to be unconventional
cursors in behavior). The cat makes a move to what's on the table first.

When "abc" is selected, we see "abc" on the table monocled. Clicking it, we
see "abc" grow quickly out of sight. Ah but language seems always to be
making a comeback in The Magic Rat. It streams from the cursor, at points,
for instance.

I think we see something of aLe's "stereocena" in this piece. The cursors
are offstage but available in a menu, and they fly through the rainbow rat
door and land on the table. scenic in the way of theatre or cinema. What is
the drama? The drama of the magic rat as like the drama of mozart's magic
flute. and what is the drama of the magic flute? That would be interesting
to know. Anybody know it?

The drama, as I interpreted it (independent of the magic flute), concerned
the 'fate' of language, the globe, and referential clarity/multiplicity. The
first two are worth mentioning, but it's the last part of the drama, the
part about referential clarity/multiplicity that grabbed me. When the cursor
multiplies in its image (and it does so in many ways), or when the cursor
doubles and moves mirrored its normal movement, or when it suddenly can
rotate, etc, we are at first unsure of what has happened to the cursor or
which one of the onstage cursors it is. This is not unknown in net.art, by
any means. But what is uncommon is the existential moment in which
multiplicity of reference point concerning language and global matters finds
its referent in the drama of the referent, the pointer, the reference point.

This was the 'narrative' I focussed on. Is 'narrative' the right word? No,
'drama' is better for my interpretation, anyway. Drama can have narrative
but it doesn't have to, except possibly at a level of 'narrative' that is so
different from previous notions of narrative that it swallows 'drama' at a
gulp and many others. So I prefer 'drama' in this case, because, for me, The
Magic Rat is a kind of philosophical/theatrical drama of existential
reference in which the terms 'fantastic' and 'phenomenology' are not out of
place. A cursor steps into a bar...well it needn't be a bar, but it has rats
and cats and cheese and a table at which we are apparently sitting.

It also is a drama of control structures. This is part of the drama of the
globe, but also the issue of control over the cursor. It is a give and take
of control between the code's control structures and the audience. This also
is not unknown in net.art. But there is an unusually strong sense of dialog
in The Magic Rat with the author, partly via the give and take nature of the
control drama. The code/author takes control in a variety of situations, but
how to get it back is never far away, and we come to see that giving up
control in some situations is where the drama begins.

I wonder if all this would be as evident were sound to be in it? I suppose
that would be a related thing drawing it closer to both the drama of the
magic flute and whatever other associations accompanied the sonic objects of
interaction apart from the flute. The role of the rat as helper to our
playing some sort of instrument would have been highlighted, also, for
clearly aLe built it so that the flute was in the works to be played
sonically as well as visually. I imagine that there, too, the drama/dialog
of control, this time over the sound, would be engaged. But somehow I
enjoyed the silence and aLe's suggestion to simply imagine the sound:

"That work is unfinished, it lacks the music: a coral of mice intoning
Mozart's "Magic Flute", but that is easy of you to imagine... "

Could they be philosophical mice? Sort of like the mantric voices in
MANTRASH turn very funky for a mo before the MANTRASH crisis in
http://www.eale.hpg.com.br/2002/mantrash ?

Interesting piece, aLe!

ja