RE: [-empyre-] Viewing Axalotls

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

> "Everyone sees the world in his or her own likeness and therefore the
> dialogue between "Me and the World" is different from person to
> person." So
> that,  there are many realities or better than this is to ask: Is reality
> possible? Perhaps Reality is really Magic?
>
> However if you begin think, you will discover another fundamental
> difference
> between Kafka and Cortazar. Gregor Samsa turn into cockroach and
> disapeared,
> only the cockroach keeps on in the story. Cortazar "man" or my
> "woman"  turn
> into Axolotl but keep on being man/woman and it is just this that
> I think is
> fantastic because it was a notable intuition of Virtual Reality
> and in this
> case the story is deeply social : Me and my Avatar Woman. If you think in
> this way you can think about Ideology or about Media building Ideology or
> you. Here a question must be done:
>
> _Who builds Ideology? Who says that 2+2=4 in our today's world ?

Do you see the proposition that 2+2=4 as part of a political ideology? I am
not sure how it can be conceived as a political proposition.

There is, in a sense, considerable baggage behind '2+2=4'. I read that crows
apparently have a rudimentary sense of number, which must surely require
some form of 'language' on their part, so in some sense they might
comprehend that 'two' 'things' 'grouped' with 'two' 'other' 'things' is
'more than' 'two' 'things' 'grouped' with 'one' 'other' thing', and is 'less
than' 'two' 'things' 'grouped with' 'three' 'other' 'things', but any such
understanding would be quite different from an understanding that '2+2=4',
which is a written proposition with all the baggage of writing and
arithmetic behind it. Does writing itself constitute some political
ideology? If so, how so?

> > Also, I note that Cortazar's "Axalotls" is from his collection
> "The End of
> > the Game" and your piece has a kind of a game in it. Is this
> coincidence?
>
> Yes, it is.  Almost everybody like games. All my books have a game, the
> first four have old games and the next four will have modern games. The
> first that has a  computer  game (very simple) is " Viewing Axolotls".
> However, my games are not really games, they are a way to show
> ideas that I
> consider important in a ludic way. Computers are successfull because they
> are
> ludic among other things.

This is interesting. Yes, your 'games' do differ from the 'regular' notion
of a 'game', somehow. Just exactly how they differ from a 'regular game',
though, well, I think that is a question I don't know the answer to because
it would involve a clearer notion of what a 'regular' game is than I have.
But I find it interesting that "Viewing Axalotls" and some of your other
works do seem to pose this question implicitly. Also, the proximity of the
notion of 'game' in "Viewing Axalotls" to a notion something like 'art play'
or 'unfolding' in an interactive setting suggests subtle relationships
between art, play, and game. It does seem to me that 'play', or the ludic,
if I understand that word correctly, inform both art and game in a variety
of ways, and the notion of 'play' is a kind of link between art and game.

Also, from a somewhat pragmatic point of view, in interactive work, how the
thing is to be played with, in a general sort of way, has to be understood
somehow by the player, if they are to be a player at all, and so the notion
of a 'game' with certain 'rules' or 'ways to play' can be useful as a means
of suggesting not only how to play with the piece but also the extent of the
combinatorial space as you establish certain nodes and possibly
actions/discoveries within them as 'goals'.

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