Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance

["Franck Ancel" <franck.ancel@wanadoo.fr>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sally Jane Norman" <S.J.Norman@newcastle.ac.uk>
To: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2005 8:43 AM
Subject: RE: [-empyre-] networked_performance



Dear empyricists, and special hello to Chris

this thread is really stimulating - was weaving the inevitable mekhane into
a text a couple of weeks back when it cropped up here like a Deux ex
Machina - and now the animism thread.

The archaic world of puppets - manipulated objects - and automats -
self-moving objects - and all the hybrid entities that span the continuum
between those two categories seems to me to offer useful insights into our
notions of live/ness. Gaze as giver of life - le report de la vie, as we say
in French.

For me, it is this propensity to read life and live:li:ness into things that
connects the most ancient effigies and totems, to those strange creatures
our prosthetised eyes are revealing in outer space - Saturn's moons or the
capsule that relates them to us - and at "non"human scales on earth, as in
the shaping of nanomolecular surfaces. Mixes here of computational display
and obdurately physical entities and terrain - as exemplified by our being
able to follow Opportunity getting out of a rut on some distant planet.

With thanks for the discussion and lively ideas

best wishes

sjn

=>  Besides, as early as 1963 Jacques Polieri thought that «since some
actions take place at some very far distances on one hand, some others could
equally be contemplated thanks to technology. No doubt, the inclination,
rotation, orbits and movements of planetary systems make up the actual
geometrical structure of a future scenography».

all the best
fa