[-empyre-] body 'chair' language / El Colgado

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

Daniel, I am finding your response on colonial history not at all distracting from the discussion...

(and thanks to Sue's earlier posting in which she is, perhaps understandably, critical of my scepticism and my proposing the term 'slapstick' for defenseless encounters with interactive dispositifs or artificial intelligence machines -- and incidentally, Sue, I had a similar hilarious accident some years ago in Switzerland during my first skying outing going up on the "chair" lift [english, not french] and failing to understand/know the jump off technique at the summit and getting entangled in the lift mechanism to the extent that they had to stop the whole machine as I virtually hung upside down like an 'angel caido' or, to use a better image (following tarot cards) like El Colgado, a man hanging upside down from one foot 'who is unable to move or make any decisions... without the power to give form or direction to his life...')..

I guess the Colgado experience stuck with me and I am cautious about what Sue calls the "amazing potential to understand the intertwinedness of one's own experience in-and-as the system, through spending time in-and-as some amazing interactive environments..."

(In fact, do we not spend much of our life in interactions, with shopping malls, schools, banks, streets, social places, institutions, playing fields, forests, festivals, libraries, etc?)

so now it (the colonial history and antropófago) makes me wonder whether we can revisit "porosity" as well, a term that was used repeatedly by some of you as if it were a positive valuation of embodied experience.
What if it were not? 

And perhaps, Daniel, the distractions need to go further, what if we indeed for a moment looked at language and mis/translations or porosities that are, politically very highly charged?

(As to Brasilian modernism and then the 60s/70s, I do remember that Hélio Oticica's work was incredibly inspiring for us in the DAP-Lab, and Michèle Danjoux and I – as we began to work on wearables and constructing
wearable instruments – looked to Oiticica's parangolés and the exuberant experiences the wearers had when dancing with/through the colorful cloth (I wrote a small piece, "Bodies of Color," Performing Arts Journal 87 (2007), 35-45,
available here:  http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/pajj.2007.29.3.35))

The word that I came across today is "Surzhyk" (originally it meant flour or bread made from mixed grains, e.g., wheat with rye) (Cyrillic: су́ржик) denoting a range of mixed sociolects of Ukrainian and Russian languages used in certain regions of Ukraine and adjacent lands, and a cultural ethnographer (cited in the German FAZ newspaper) discussed the problems in today's political crisis in the Ukraine (the postcolonial Ukraine) where some or most people in Western  Ukraine speak Ukrainian whereas many in Eastern Ukraine speak Russian and many, especially in the countryside, speak Surzhyk and that can be dangerous either in the East or the West; in fact the choice of a language (and I assume for a moment that dialects are grown and culturally evolved and thus embodied) at the moment reflects the huge dangers of polarization as well as mingling.

Now, refering to the political crisis in the Occupied Territories and Gaza, an interview with mathematician/logic/computer scientist Helmut Veith in last weekend's Sueddeutsche Zeitung struck my attention as the talk centered on algorithms and artificial intelligence dispositifs, and Mr Veith at some point ventured to say that logic is used to draw insights and consequences about the world, and that artificial intelligence software simulates how machine learning can be effective (for example fuzzy logics dealing with ambiguities of translations of language); then he says, asked about drone strikes carried out by machine intelligence, that "es wäre im eigentlichen Sinn des Wortes unmenschlich, Entscheidungen über Leben und Tod dem Computer zu überlassen. Es sei denn, zwei Drohnen erschiessen sich gegenseitig, das wäre mir sympathisch....."  
[trans:  "it would be in the true sense of the word inhuman to leave decisions about life and death to the computer. Unless two drones shoot each other, that would be sympathetic to me ..... "

Could one argue that "virtual embodiment" is a parochial media arts concern or academic research area? Thus of little consequence for most people except that affordances, say, Google's private buses in San Francisco, or other corporate conglomerates' machinations (ebay now also working with Sotheby, I heard, to enlarge auction customer base virtually speaking), will draw defenses and protests, or make you question where your sympathies lie when the drone hits your house.  (Sorry, this last thought needs more thinking through, but friends who are/were in Palestinia and are writing me make me anxious). 

regards
Johannes Birringer