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

[Rodney Berry]

Thanks Alan,

I agree that the physical wont go away but I think that what AR reminds me
of is that we use physical things in our environment as symbols, so as
carriers of meaning, physical things are part of the mediascape as well. I
am relatively new to Baudrillard but I've been reading him side-by-side with
Virilio as they seem to be in a kind of conversation in many ways. to read
people who talk about 'the violence of the hyphen' makes me wonder if they
have experienced being punched in the face for example. Okay,
serbo-croatians and sino-russians might disagree with me there but I don't
see Virilio, who went off to war and experienced physical violence, being so
loose with the term nor ignoring the fragility of the body.

about the tecnology itself, I like Alan's comment that holding a phone out
at arm's-length creates a 'bubble'. although glasses would eliminate this,
the resolution is still 640x480 and $2000 usd lets you graduate to
800x600ish resolutions (which may be mostly dithered up form a lower
resolution). until we are projecting straight into the retina, display seems
to be stuck for a while although the things *are *getting progressively
lighter and cheaper.

The means for tracking, registering and rendering in 3D shows improvement.
It's partly just faster computers but also new approaches to the math of
identifying natural features in a video image and interpreting them as 3D
objects in a space relative to the camera.

It's interesting that VR never really happened so Im still cautious about
saying that 'now's the time!' for augmented reality. certainly there's a lot
more we can do than just annotate tourist spots and battleground features.

Rod.


On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 12:32 PM, Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com> wrote:

>
>
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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