[-empyre-] No. 1, Day 4, Week 2

[Marcus Boon]

Those are fascinating comments, John.  I've been interested in scale-independence as a strategy of copying for a while.  You find it in intriguing ways in Buddhism where you might have a Sutra, i.e. a teaching, that has a one word version, a 1000 word version, and a 100,000 word version ... and all are considered the same.  But how/why? This relates to my earlier comments about the enigma of sameness, and the notion of non-sensuous similarity.  In In Praise of Copying, one of the ways I approached this was through some of Morton Feldman's ideas about scale ... for Feldman, a large part of the creative process was deciding on what scale a deployment of certain elements starts to become powerful.

Could you say more about scale-independence as you're using the term? 

Sounds like a great dissertation ... what's the field of inquiry, if that isn't too intrusive a question?

As for your last two lines: the sameness of the null set, or "nothing" is precisely what I mean by a non-identical sameness!

But how do you see that operating in Douglas' book?

best
Marcus



On 2014-06-13, at 1:19 PM, John Hopkins wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 
>> figures like Alvin Lucier's physics mentor Edmond Dewan.  And I get the core
>> point about the natural history of media, and the ways in which what gets
>> called "technology" as a human endeavor, is necessarily embedded in these
>> natural strata -- geophysical energy, electromagnetic forces, and so on.
> 
> Another strategy is to shift to scale-independence when considering EM radiation -- or, more precisely, the idea that EM energy underlies all scales of 'reality' as it is perceived by our body-systems as well as by all the 'hearing', 'seeing' and other sensory instrumentation that we deploy to provide us information about reality that our bodies cannot directly sense. Another words, the nature of reality as we can model it here in words is provided by EM radiation. And, ultimately, it is that narrow band of EM radiation that we can directly perceive through which we determine our complete impression of reality -- analog signals (energy) received by our embodied configuration of energized matter.
> 
> Furthermore, we are comprised by the fields and flows through which we perceive: talk about the fish's conception of water!
> 
> Technology may be framed as an applied re-configuration of energy (EM) flow -- applied by humans who are themselves re-configurations of energy flows that Life has 'imposed' on the cosmos.
> 
> As I explore in my dissertation, "The Regime of Amplification", the re-configurations are essentially the application of evolved protocols that direct EM (energy) flows. From this point of view, widely divergent 'systems' -- bio-systems, techno-social systems, self-organizing systems, geo-systems -- may be more powerfully comprehended in their continuity with wider phenomena (their complete embeddedness to all that surrounds them). No phenomena is singular or unitary except by abstraction.
> 
> Consider asking the question, from an old Cartesian pov: Where in the universe is a 'space' that is not 'infused' with electromagnetic energy, or is not comprised of EM energy?
> 
> The answer is a null set: and this is what unifies all the chapters in Douglas' book ...
> 
> Cheers,
> John
> 
> -- 
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
> taking Manhattan as Berlin isn't possible right now
> http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre