[-empyre-] Thoughts about Peirce, semiosis and new language

[Bill Seaman <bseaman@risd.edu>]

Dear Marcus - thanks for the wonderful Peirce 
quotes --- they are very interesting in this 
context.


Here are some of the relations I wish to point at 
as being slightly different from the long list of 
people who articulated ideas surrounding 
hypertext as digital writing and perhaps go 
beyond even Pierces definitions (ever so 
slightly).

Digital writing has some new attributes that for 
me transcend the Remediation concept. I'll try to 
put my finger on a few of them.

I have a very broad definition of Digital 
Writing? I want to try to point at where I think 
some new language might be helpful?

When I encounter a meta text in Char Davies 
Osmose that is the code of the work as presented 
as meta- architecture (literal virtual 
architecure --- a pun on architecture), the 
experiential nature of the environment, in 
particular the physical interface she has 
designed to enable one to navigate the  virtual 
environment becomes enfolded phenomenologically 
with the layers of meaning in the text. All of 
Peirces modes - firstness, secondness and 
thirdness co-mingle and change in relation to 
ongoing navigation of this virtual space. Yet 
here the environment also enables a charged field 
of meaning to become part of this layering. The 
quixotic nature of the ongoing subtle shifts 
between firstness, secondness and thirdness seem 
to even transcend the idea that each level is 
becoming the other (as Marcus suggests) in terms 
of this larger mutable virtual environmental 
scheme which also signifies. This constellation 
of signs, each changing at its own velocity in 
relation to the participant's movements, seems to 
move to a heightened level of layering of 
intersemiotic modes. Might we work on a new word 
that points at this advanced level of 
intersemiotic relations. ---
What would Pierce have encountered that would be 
relevant to compare to such an environment? Here 
are some potential terms ---
hyperintersemiotic; transintersemiotic (did 
Marcos Novak already coin this?) 
supra-intersemiotic? Intra-semiotic?

I also begin to think about new forms of locative 
media that depend on landscape and physical 
navigation, lending levels of meaning to the 
digital text (context)? Hyperecosemiotic?

I think about media- behaviors and a-life 
parameters/potentialities giving text new kinds 
of electronic "life".  Artificial-Semiotic-life - 
a-sem-life

I think about physics and artificial physics 
(E-phany physics as I coined it) as it is 
conjoined with texts to present new kinds of 
reactive and intra-active environments. 
E-phanysemiotics

Hayles uses the term "Creole" to talk about texts 
that intermingle code and poetic text ---
Yet what happens when this is extended into the 
phenomenological space of physical computing. An 
object|creole enfolding is generated.

What happens when the machine writes the text in 
an autonomous manner that is reacting to various 
forms of interface input? Lynn Hershmann's Agent 
Ruby? Does the fact that it is a machine change 
the meaning in a subtle manner --- is there a 
word for this? Turingtestmatic writing?

Kac wrote a bio-code via the computer that was 
made physical and transcribed back into a text 
--- what kind of word points at this accretive 
layering of meaning - digitaccretive?

Works where all variables are supplied by the 
participant and are then formed by the code into 
a new work--- participant driven semiosis?? 
I-semiosis?

Or works that actually are auto destructive in 
terms of meaning production --- the virus t-shirt 
code? Diss-semiosis


b

--
Professor Bill Seaman, Ph.D.
Department  Head
Digital+ Media Department (Graduate Division)
Rhode Island School of Design
Two College St.
Providence, R.I. 02903-4956
401 277 4956
fax 401 277 4966
bseaman@risd.edu

http://billseaman.com
http://www.art.235media.de/index.php?show=2
http://digitalmedia.risd.edu