Re: [-empyre-] hello

[hight@34n118w.net]

>
> I wrote that line hoping someone would want to question it...

I think you touch upon a lot of important things I have not included in my
work as much as I would like......

on one hand I see reading a novel as a form of vr.....had a class at   cal
arts that argued things like vr could be seen in a way in open ended
architecture......one wall open reveals a sense of place and other....of a
movement between.... .

and on the other I have long seen body as a complex sort of
coding........I used to do experiments where I taught myself how to see a
person's face in quadrants....and it is odd.....but once I got the hang of
it...the personality seen in a friend's face could disappear......a cave
with twin openings (nose)  wet orbs (eyes)  and even for a few seconds as
I saw their whole face it was like a stranger........so familiarity is a
form of compositing and encoding........like how as a kid on camping trips
we would talk by the fire and almost see each other in the
dark......sometimes you could feel yourself trying to construct a whole
from the fragments illuminated at a distance........and being born with
cerebral palsy and being told I would never walk....then having surgery
new enough that I would have been in the news but my parents (thankfully)
declined.....and walking at age 3 and a half for the first time in a
hospital.....living with a body appearing large and strong yet also being
diagnosed with "hidden disability" due to limitations from spinal problems
and a leg lacking in muscle from all the surgery........."body" has always
been quite complex to me.......I used to think of lightning in a piece of
meat as a teenager as an analogy to the mind and thought.......and of how
body is beautiful asthetically yet also is a machine.........arms and legs
to forage for food....to move to shelter..........

so the concept of self and body in physical space in its complexity is
something I need to interweave into my work more intricately......

I once read of a computer program that calculated what is percieved as
physically beautiful in a human face ..........it concluded that it was
symmetry.......mathematical symmetry..........

I find that fascinating because it misses an essential point.........that
of the short story "the birthmark " by nathaniel hawthorne....

A scientist is happy with everything but love and once introduced to an
incredible woman he first falls in love then becomes obsessed with her one
flaw....a birthmark on her cheek........he builds a machine to remove it

and as he does she looks at him with sad eyes which seem to say "why?" as
she floats away and disappears.......

perfection is not of the human realm.......beauty is the funny
laugh.....the memory of a trip gone awry together in the rain.....beauty
is imperfect............and beauty is fed with language and moments and
shadings that are internal...........the code and data bits and what
appears..

> the flaw in vr is that is one place......and one is aware of being in
> another.........
>
> -- which might be a limited way of looking at vr; starting with the coding
> of the body - which also has its layers, submergences, emergences,
> symbolics, semantics, etc. - and moving through the diffused or fuzzy
> contextualizing coding - there _is_ no one place, no 'another' - I do
> understand what you're getting at here I think, but I'd argue for a much
> more radical approach to this or these, based on melding, almost an
> Irigarayan flux...- alan, hoping not too far off topic
>
>
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> Trace projects http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm
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>
>
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