[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 77, Issue 5

[Alan Sondheim]

Hi - I want to respond to Patrick, and since it seems to be the second 
week, introduce some thoughts of my own; if the timing is off, please 
ignore the latter.

Baudrillard via Patrick, "Jean Baudrillard wrote of the supercession of 
the virtual over the physical.  The mediascape would override material 
reality as the mediascape becomes supreme." The problem I have with B. 
(not with Patrick!) is what's almost always overlooked - the inertial, 
abjection, of the physical. The mediascape is inordinately fragile (as 
sysadmins will tell us); with already 86-90% of all email spam, for 
example, filters are beginning to fail/fall all over the place. Large- 
scale disasters - Katrina, Japan, Haiti - easily demonstrate this 
fragility. When there's revolution or large-scale social change - Egypt, 
Tunisia, etc. - we tend to trot out cellphone and twitter users, as if the 
events were dependent on electronic networking (which makes them oddly 
dependent on western technology as well). AR is still, as far as I can 
tell, relatively primitive; on the street, it's awkward. There are real 
interface issues - holding up a cellphone-sized screen means that the body 
isn't withdrawn, but forms almost like a bubble in front of it. I do think 
this will change if and when augmented glasses become (widely) available; 
it would be incredible to walkabout a space that descends seamlessly among 
reals and virtuals (to the extent they're separable at all). Just as with 
Second Life, it's often the client that appears clumsy, and once the 
viewer is brought into a control-room situation (i.e. where tacit 
knowledge disappears and one has to 'fiddle' with parameters in order to 
make the thing work), AR, the experience, becomes a novelty and not a 
lived experience. (Which may be what someone wants, but with the latter, 
there are so many possibilities!)

I keep thinking of AR I'd like to experiment with, if I had the program- 
ming ability - this is where I'm going, what I've explored in SL and 
elsewhere - 1. The ragged edges of the world -  large-scale spaces where 
the image appears to be nothing more than missing pixels or noise in the 
screen. If it were possible to actually use noise, live, one might think 
about the fact that some part of it is related to the cosmic microwave 
background radiation. In other words, instead of augmented realtiy, how- 
ever defined, one might think of diminished reality (however defined). 2. 
Along the same lines, the appearance of an object so large (I'm thinking 
in particular of my distorted avatars, but that's the nature of my work), 
that the screen is filled with it - nothing else, no background at all, is 
visible. You might walk through a space and have different sections of 
(virtual? real?) flesh revealed, but this would be all you'd see. Or if a 
sufficiently detailed gif is used, wherever you went, the flesh would face 
you, suppurate, you wouldn't be able to escape it. 3. Forbidden images - 
pornography, violence, abugharayb, that would appear/disappear quickly, as 
if in recognition of their violation - 'did you see that' - these images 
wouldn't appear on command - just every so often - lures, seductions. 4. 
If it were possible, images that play with whatever information could be 
quickly obtained from the Net - about the owner of the phone - i.e. "This 
is you" - and the owner's name or image. 5. Statements on the order of 
"You are going to die on July 24, 2014" - or the opposite "You will still 
be alive on July 24th, 2014" - dealing with the difference between death 
and delete, virtual and real. 6. Pictures of current disaster areas, 
constantly updated - warzones, earthquakes, floods - anything to move the 
viewer out of his or her complacency. (I don't think symbolic images - say 
of flags, coffins, money, etc. really have that much emotional effect, but 
I may be wrong.)

In any cases, images that resonate, that make the viewer want to return to 
them, share them, that lure the viewer in, that have some sort of efficacy 
as they appear to _leak_ between the real and the virtual, ontologically 
settling nowhere except in the mind.

- Alan