[-empyre-] Welcome to Mickey

[John Hopkins]

morning reflections/questions before breakfast...

>We are extremely grateful to Out-of-Sync (Marie Miranda and Norie 
>Neumark) for getting us off to such a great start in considering 
>Memory Errors in the Technosphere.  It's probably appropriate, given 
>our emphasis on art, accident, and archive, that Maria's posts were 
>sequested in archival limbo by some software quirk in our 
>administrative system.  For that we apologize.  But we're very 
>pleased to have profited from their vast experience in creating 
>artistic interventions in archival and memory errors, both material, 
>virtual, and psychic.

does anyone remember what words were expressed on empyre three weeks 
ago?  last year?  three years ago?

what happens when we cannot remember where we left the list of things 
to remember?

what happens when all memory is external?  will this mean that we 
will be living in the perfect Zen dream of be-here-now?  or that we 
would be constantly repeating our mistakes?

as for errors, is there a difference between internal embodied memory 
errors and external disembodied memory errors?  are there different 
consequences?  False memory could be dangerous in terms of survival...

I don't see a difference in preserving any (material) form of 
external memory.  it is a thermo-dynamic function.  without a 
more-or-less constant influx of energy to maintain order, memory will 
dissolve into its component energies and dissipate into the 
background radiation of the universe -- ensuring that there is a 
constant source of low-level memory of what the universe is composed 
of.

Maintaining an archive requires energy.  Doing documentation requires 
that (at least someone's) attention be focused on both archive 
(future) and the process itself (present).  Each time the Self makes 
a document there is at least a partial stepping-out of lived 
experience into the abstracted world of the document.  It is in this 
abstracted world where we are most in danger of losing connection to 
primary experience and ultimately our embeddedness in the continuum 
which is all.

Representation forces us to step out.  Can one live by the act of 
representation, or ???

When we step out, where do we go?

Of course documentation can be a re-presentative act in itself.  one 
which places the observer at that place at that time which is 
different than subsequent after-the-fact re-play...

There would also be the quantum thought of the observer affecting 
that which is observed, as well... something that has fundamental 
ramifications...

Norie -- could you define 'performative encounter' in more detail? 
(vs 'straight' documenting?)

Cheers,
JOhn