[-empyre-] Grappling bodies, differences among bodies & gestures

[John Hopkins]

Simon has closed the discussion, but I hadn't finished this set of musings on 
some of the recent performance works brought up remotely...

> Memory, then, would seem to be primarily corporeal, inhabited, and
> particular, not easily out-sourced to an off shore account, or transfered to
> affectless place holders   (in terms of kinetic affect, it would interest me
> how Kirk, and the audience with hand-held devices,  experienced the virtual
> dancers and their transformed gestures off the streets of Brighton?). What
> would the avatar remember?

Some meta-commentary (as we watch performances of elswehere and elswhen on 
youtube...this past month)

The biggest problem with externalized memory (to the avatar!) is that when 
memory is disembodied from the Self, we may no longer feel its effects – in 
recall, in re-living. we may only simulate the feeling of it, or, at most, 
resonate with the symbolic values represented in its reproduction. individual 
embodied memory is directly experienced as a changed body state. externalizing 
memory is a particular and collective phenomena which arises when the pain of 
actual experience and its associated memory is too much to bear. externalizing 
is available from the same technologies (tele) which cause the pain to begin 
with — dislocation and the pain of separation. perhaps technological development 
may not proceed fully until the relevant memories are externalized to begin 
with, then the pain of alienation is transferred to a painless place.

Memory is the trace of energies from the surrounding situation that literally 
impress (on) the embodied self. Making the radical assumption framed by the 
words of physicist David Bohm, that

" ..there is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be 
known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and 
shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal 
flux."

Phenomenal events and configurations of these energies pass through the body (as 
simply another manifestation of this flux), leaving altered states of be-ing. 
These embodied traces persist in time, but as with all life and being, are 
transitory. They exist as change, and are often experienced as a fundamental 
awareness of difference — “I originally felt like that, but now I feel like 
this, having experienced this event.”

External memory storage situations via digital technological mediation are, by 
nature, material, reductive, and transitory. They are subject to decay and loss 
as with any other external (and internal) means.

Three significant issues arise in the process of externalized memory storage. 
The first is in the process of creating the artifact. As with any pre-digital 
artifact, making a “memory” artifact requires that the Self (or someone) step 
out of living and mediate their presence in the operation of the device that 
creates the artifact. This stepping out applies not only to the making of the 
artifact but also to the (onerous) process of archiving. This process radically 
changes the experience of a life-trajectory by an individual. And, as suggested 
by Quantum ideas, the observer affects that which is observed, the act of making 
memory artifacts actually affects the scenario that is being recorded.

A second major issue occurs when any of these processes are taken over by 
extensions of the Techno-Social System, they subject the Self to a loss of 
autonomy. (i.e., cloud computing as one example of a centralized architecture 
that removes the trace of the digital artifact wholly out of the purview of the 
individual (creator, participant).) The levels of loss of autonomy exist on a 
sliding scale — loss occurs whenever the individual is not in control of the 
mediatory storage (its provenance, creation, organization, archiving, 
sustenance, distribution, demise, destruction). Any externalization falls under 
this regime.

The third issue lies in the maintenance of archive. As a fundamentally ordered 
system (timely retrieval is critical for a functioning archive), the archive 
requires an essentially constant energy influx to maintain that order. That 
energy source is, at base, the human being. How much personal energy will humans 
participating in a Techno-social system be willing to dispense of or 
provide/support in order to maintain an ever-growing energy burden of either a 
collective or individual archive? Is this why the Library of Alexandria burned?

etc etc etc....

So it goes, from the Monsoon season in the Arizona desert highlands...

Cheers,
jh

-- 
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Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
grounded on a granite batholith
twitter: @neoscenes
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
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