[-empyre-] Tamiko Thiel on cyber-animism

[Alan Sondheim]

One way I deal with this is through the notions of culture and inscription -
that culture is culture per se 'all the way down' in relation to species,
and that inscription is the fundamental characteristic of the world, the
human body - beyond which lies only the threshold of pain and death,
unutterable, ikonic, beyond the Pale or effluence of symbols/the symbolic.
Real and unreal are always already problematic, problems, especially given
string theory, virtual particles, planck distances, black hole interiors,
and so forth; where should the line be drawn? I think not at all. There's no
such thing as the 'merely physical or merely visible' (I follow Lingis in
this regard; the interweavings are mingled with desire, decay/corrosion,
simulacra, etc. It's easiest on the other hand to define augmented reality
precisely in terms of hallucinatory constructs, or images augmented, not in
relation to the real, but in relation to the technological, images that are
fundamentally projects and projected. On the other hand - and there are
other hands always, and infinite other hands, given the possible holographic
nature of the universe (cosmos), we're all within Plato's cave - only the
source of the projections, the horizon, is no more real than the images
themselves; everything, even pain, death, thresholding, is within the
imaginary. - Alan

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 5:07 AM, Mathias Fuchs <
mathias.fuchs at creativegames.org.uk> wrote:

> Hi Tamiko,
>
> you stretch the notion of augmented reality quite wide, when you include
> cave-paintings and animist folk-practices.
> Wouldn't one have to introduce some aspect of conscious understanding of
> the nature of the augmented when speaking about augmented reality. In other
> words: if I consider something like a mountain ghost or a river goddess as
> real and make a cave painting of it, then this painting is part of my
> reality, it is not augmented reality.
> The problem is this: If we consider any non-physical or even invisible
> artefact as augmenting our reality, then reality shrinks down to the merely
> physical or merely visible.
>
> The buffalo of a cave-painting is real for the painter of the buffalo, and
> even the power of the buffalo and the spirit of the buffalo-god is real for
> the painter. Those features do not differ from magnetism or rainbows or
> other real phenomena.
>
> I would suggest to call something an augmentation of reality only if it is
> a consciously introduced element of our environment that we believe to be
> unreal. Such is a display element in the viewfinder of a camera, a hologram
> on a bill etc. - not the feather of a bird that we believe to be part of a
> bird goddess.
>
> Do you see what I intend to achieve? I want to keep a difference in between
> "real" and "physical". This is also of relevance in the light of what the
> Germans call "Positivismusstreit". The side I am on tries to ake a point
> that phenomena like Freud's "es" or "ich" are real because we believe they
> exist. We would not want to classify them as augmented aspects of reality
> and as unreal. My question is therefore:
>
> I wonder whether it makes sense to distinguish between conscious non-belief
> or half-belief (Pfaller) extensions of our physical environment (virtual or
> augmented reality) and the animistic or religious  full-belief forms. The
> latter would have to be called real.
>
> Best
> Mathias
>
>
> On 20/04/2011 04:00, empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au wrote:
>
>> The urge to augment is a deep seated part of human culture, with the
>> first forms of augmented reality being cave paintings and 3D cult
>> artifacts.
>>
>
> --
> Dr. Mathias Fuchs
>  European Masters in Ludic Interfaces
>  http://ludicinterfaces.com
>  Programme Leader MA Creative Technology and MSc Creative Games
>  Salford University, School of Art&  Design, Manchester M3 6EQ
>  http://creativegames.org.uk/
>  mobile: +44 7949 60 9893
>
> residential address: Ratiborstrasse 18
>  10999 Berlin, Germany
>  phone: +49 3092109654
>  mobile: +49 17677287011
>
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>



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