Re: [-empyre-] archiving + preservation] forward from Ken Fields

[ben syverson <ben@bensyverson.com>]

On May 7, 2004, at 11:19 AM, Kenneth Fields wrote:

> what are you aiming for at the moment, or in the near future? RSS to 
> your
> 'new nodes' page? :)

Well, sort of, but it could be much deeper than that, such as 
personalized RSS streams for each subscriber. We already have a 
subscription system for nodes, so you can be notified by email if 
someone edits or comments on nodes you're interested in. So that would 
be the first to happen. Then you could subscribe to:

- New nodes
- New nodes/edits by your favorite liken users
- New nodes by metatag (you could subscribe to the metatag "emergent 
systems")
- New links to favorite nodes (be alerted anytime a new link appears to 
your fav nodes)
- New interviews
- New nodes with a text of 500 words or more

And so on; it's virtually limitless what you could subscribe to.


> As I alluded to before - the human
> mind is itself a network always in danger of being constrained by an 
> ever
> tightening matrix of network bonds. Artists are professionals in 
> jostling
> this structure, with the big prize going to the one who causes major
> disruption, establishment of new cultural attractors, or pushing some
> critical threshold over the top.

Most definitely, and liken was conceived of as a tool for performing 
exactly these tasks. By forging new connections and acting as a kind of 
mind of its own, liken encourages people to build new neural pathways 
and reexamine old ones.

And much like a group of people can often come up with ideas that none 
of them individually would have, I honestly feel that the distributed 
network of liken has its own unique creativity. I could be perceived as 
anthropomorphizing/romanticizing liken, but as it grows, I see it make 
fascinating decisions.


> anyway, your images are great. keep it up. If you want to hear it, go 
> to:
> http://cemc.ccom.edu.cn/sounds/caw.html .
> You can see, the sound goes from older nodes to newest - green is left
> speaker, red (not much of it) goes to right speaker. I changed the 
> black
> lines (which don't mean anything to the sonogram) to yellow, which 
> means
> center.
> This in itself doesn't have any significance for me. It just 
> highlights the
> fact that the mapping of concepts to image (or 3d space) and to sound 
> needs
> some critical attention.

This is really interesting! I've wanted to audibly hear the structure 
of liken for some time now, so it's gratifying to finally get the 
chance. But you're right; the larger issue is how to perform lossy 
conversions such as these gracefully. On the one hand, the concept of 
receiving data sonically is so attractive that the pure formalism of 
the sound may not matter. However, at a certain point, perhaps a more 
critical eye (or ear) is needed once the novelty is gone. The problem 
then is, where do you go from there? In my experience, sound art is 
perhaps the most difficult medium to critique and discuss critically in 
the current context.

In any case, these would be interesting issues to address and discuss 
with a liken-eating sound app.


> The mapping of concepts to space show clusters of related concepts 
> (strong
> links) - that seems to work. Or does it? Is conceptual 'space' more 
> than a
> metaphor.

I'm glad you brought this up! I've thought about this a lot, and it 
came up many times while I was developing liken. The issue was that we 
wanted to have a more [visual/spatial] representation of the node 
structure. But this complicates matters 100-fold. Think of the example 
Jaka brought up about the links from a "rock" node. "Rock" may be very 
close to "Music" in conceptual space, and it may also be very close to 
"Geology," but "Music" and "Geology" are very far apart in conceptual 
space. This destroys the idea of "clusters," unless nodes are 
constantly rearranging themselves into clusters -- at which point the 
cluster is basically a list, which is our current default.

We can mentally reconcile this problem very easily, because that's the 
way our mind works.  Of course "Rock" can have a million connotations! 
But when it comes down to displaying these relationships on a grid of 
pixels in 2D or 3D space, all existing models of representation fall 
short. The "nodemap" representation of liken is the dumb, brute-force 
method of describing the pathways as fixed in 2D space. This would be 
similar to (if it were possible) taking a picture of the brain from the 
top, with every neuron and connection visible. It's interesting to look 
at, but ultimately useless in its ability to really tell us anything.

That's why when we talk about "conceptual cartography," we're talking 
about fundamentally different ways of embodying the neighborhoods and 
networks of paths and concepts. Hopefully this is interesting enough to 
inspire others to develop new imaginations of liken; certainly it is to 
us, and we have many alternate reincarnations in mind...

- ben