Re: [-empyre-] Defining metacreation...

["Aliette Guibert" <guibertc@criticalsecret.com>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul Brown" <paul@paul-brown.com>
To: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Saturday, November 06, 2004 3:37 AM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Defining metacreation...


> >re. Metacreation... the term is stirring up some reaction; below is
> >a grab from [spectre] which briefly explains my intended meaning..
>
> Another context here is Alan Kay's 1984 paper "Software" (Scientific
> American Special Issue on Computers) where he described computational
> process as a metamedium (since it can simulate many existing media as
> well as create new ones).  Kay likes the prefix meta- though it hasn't
> caught on in the mainstream - he's also applied it to the ground-breaking
> operating system - Smalltalk.  There's also the contemporary use of the
> word in the internet usage:  Metadata is information-about-information.
>
> Also I find (Aliette's?) comment that the term as used by Mitchell is
> abusive unacceptable.  It infers that human creation is impossible to
> follow or improve on - implying it is (or humans themselves are) in some
> special, supreme (or worse - hallowed) position. This is an arrogant
> assumption reeking of theocratic dogma and should be questioned.
> Humans will eventually become either extinct or obsolete - there is
> no doubt about this. If we want the concept of live to survive in the
> universe we should emphasize the creation of our successors.


Just to present 'Aliette's?

I am not a professor but a 'former avant-gardist as you could see my
personal name quoted between a group in any "international dictionary of
design and applied arts" ( http://www.rre.casalini.com/1997/BF-97-12.html )
; or other exhibition catalogue from events in the last sixties ('former -no
as a past glory, there was only a little of noise among the others, and I
was at first one of the useful one in matter of critical concepts of this
group, whom members did not continue for political reasons dividing them
(so : past by decree of a critical break in following early seventies
- as other in my generation did it so) in the matter specially of
exhibitions at New-York (on Plastics), or Milan (Triennial) or second
Biennial of Paris, or (I do not remember which event more so I
apologize) or in Germany and so on...

Could be interesting sometimes to tell of the past when a specialist as
Jeffrey L. Meikle coming from Austin and having a drink with others
after the symposium "Plasticity" recognize your name and tell it you,
like it happened to us at Fresnoy (National Studio (Fr) four years ago.
It was openly nice and pleasant.

After the break I practiced cinema as a worker to win my money,
and I was the assistant (on concept and on creative partnerships)
of a graphist whose name is Guy Peellaert - during any years...
Then national TV producer in real-fiction documentary (Fr3)
and director assistant then producer
of any interactive programs of video in national Educational TV.
Rewriter of scenarios and so on... writing and directing two short
films (the short second running a moment with a film by Leos Carrax
'boy meets girl")... and a lot of bullshits.

Of course any good friends of mine are well known radical philosophers,
artists or composers, but their talent could not be my own dress
because they wear trousers :)

'Former in the sense which could agree that it happened to me a radical
point of view breaking exactly at the first generation of the Punk move
and following in a deep social radical experiments in matter of help
to friend in hard situation and so more - but I am not a terrorist :)

Writer chief and curator of a multifield monthly magazine as poïetic
research on new medias "The TV observer" published by Leo Scheer,
and then creating by my own since September 1999 this following
multifield and artistic review online thanks
to young artists from the multimedia department of multimedia at
Ecole nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs à Paris
http://www.criticalsecret.com

specially Timothée Rolin, Hikaru Fujii, Gallien Guibert and Fabrice Depoix
(metacinema - I could tell exactly how and why - as interface of the
last issue), and others artists as
Hidekazu Minami (living in New-York), 14 issues - the last one - autumn -
of Lacan's move to the autonomy against
the new French laws in matter of therapy and testing babies at early
school...
http://www.criticalsecret.com/n14 )

Right now just publishing the first anachronistic issue of the review
in paper with an applied art work as iconoclast model...
to present in the bookshops of modern art museums, contemporary museums,
and the bookshops of literature and human sciences (out since less of
a month but still in the museums I told about in my local Paris
- ask me to global please:)

And more a book translated from Ken McKenzie Wark in real project
still working (perhaps more than one to publish others - depending
for others if I find a publisher partner or not).

Mainly in French but the third part of all is in other languages
(English or Spanish and so on).

Search for critical creative experimental universes - space, rhythms,
virtual light, poïetic theory as environmental cognitive
consciousness to critical autonomy of the mind (all different than the
autonomy of the subject which was our inheritance from The Lights, for
instance now : the perceptive/ cognitive human autonomy as singular active
and reactive of the global environmental divide (exactly the predictable
black punctum of which we cannot say anything, but where all can happen -
chaos could be another vision, more philosophical, of "the radical evil" :
that ultimate point where the theory can return in nonsense front of its
appropriate body or front of its otherness as social body - the same in
materialistic philosophy. This, extended to acknowledge of circumstances and
repetitions in materialistic vision of events and innovative world even
society and human economy.... it is not so far from semiotics to understand
nor so far from permanent revolution of the life getting it free at the
extreme of the numerous circumstances creating different : that is exactly
all the contrary of the pathological similar process and another
strategy but not identity (process of which the empirical
acknowledge coming from direct and indirect experiment of repetition and of
diverse, is all the contrary).

Our review online is no more than this sort of emergency in singular no
exclusive experiments, publishing the contents in multimedia interactive
interfaces as global sensitive universes depending of the local environment
as redactors and the environmental net-artist - without meeting themselves
but knowing of an unpredictable theme as a risk to the contents - : could be
all other appearances as neighbourhood of other sites or theories...
but always the installation media as performance of the real time
of the multimedia interactivity.

Sorry of this long sort of bio-physical-graphy in a bad and incorrect
Anglophone expression... now I return to the question by Mitchell
and friends if I can be useful among our respective discernment(s).