[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]

Tue Jun 26 04:06:19 AEST 2018

Thanks for the links, Alice. I started reading but Nick Land came up so i
stopped reading immediately. I never took him to be state-of-the-art
theory. Others might find the space interesting but its just not for me.
Reaons given here: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3284-on-nick-land

Patrick is i think pointing us both back to the nineties but also forward,
and i think that's a good note to hit before anyone starts getting into a
nostalgic vein. I think its more about bracketing-off what networks came to
be in the two consolidations of the power of what i call the vectoralist
class. The first was around 2000, with the rise of corporate forms built on
nothing but IP. The second came a decade later, with the commdification not
just of information but also of the social network itself.

Patrick also asks why the mushroom as a figure. I don't really understand
how this part works, but it is the bit i find intriguing: that mushrooms
have 36,000 genders, or something like that. Maybe Shu Lea's introduction
of the mycelium into discussion will encourage me to get a layhumans' grasp
on how that works. It seems just at first sight to be be an interesting
thought-image of how protocols might work otherwise.

mw

On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 1:10 PM, patrick lichty <p at voyd.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> As someone who would call himself postcybernetic rather than  postinternet,
> I agree with Dollyoko nd Ken.  The spaces for intereaction were highly
> heterogenous and diverse, and Honestly, I find the postinternet discourse
> relatively bland by comparison, as a lot of what it talks about is
> reference
> to postcybernetic/cyberdelic.  MOOs, MUDs, Even back to nets of online
> communities (Thing, Compuserve, Delphi, Fidonet, Usenet) was amazing. In
> many ways it seems like the corporate stacks combined with academic FOMO
> has
> created a tremendous amount of conservatism compared to the crash theory
> days of the Krokers.
>
> In many ways, I think our era of risk aversion and its pruning of the
> rhizome is indicative of the relationship between culture and capital.  As
> art fairs and consolidating gallery culture, as well as the struggle (in my
> mind) to figure ourselves out more as Postmodernism fractured into the
> Speculative Turn, the notion of the rhizome has turned into reality bubble
> foam that generally swirls under megacorporate umbrellas.
>
> This is why I love things like Dina Karadzic's FUBAR bunch, and Shu Lea's
> work the other year at the Leonore residency, but I also wonder why the
> notion of the mycorhizome is so strong these days as opposed to the
> strawberry patch (Deleuze), is it a subliminal signifier of fruit and decay
> and rebirth?
>
> Also very interested in t-shroom discussion.
>
> Love from the desert
> (also apologies for the typos - my current computer has a very flaky
> keyboard)
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> On Behalf Of warkk
> Sent: Monday, June 25, 2018 4:13 PM
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]
>
> Alan is quite right to stress how extensive the options were for online
> encounters in the 90s, beyond the handful i named. The larger point might
> still be that knowledge of any of that world is fairly thin these days.
> There are a few period accounts. dollyoko mentions Marshall's Living on
> Cybermind. Julian Dibbell wrote a book about LambdaMoo. There's a new book
> by Claire Evans called Broad Band that has good brief accounnts of Echo and
> The Word and is focused on innovations in computation by women.
>
> Of course one could ask whether the linear prose form of the book is the
> best or even a necessary way of documenting such things. I think of the
> book
> as an instance of what dollyoko calls "successionist servers." Its hard to
> keep them out of Amazon, one of the biggest vectoral class enterprises of
> our time, but they will at least 'run' independently of that proprietary
> environment.
>
> A book is a concentrated swarm whereas online communication tend to default
> to dispersed ones....
>
> dollyoko has some great language for an ongoing project: secessionist
> servers, intentional family, open family platforms, vernacular approaches
> to
> infrastructure. (To just pick a few that i think go together with the
> themes
> Shu Lea suggested).
>
> Maybe its a good thing that 90s cyberculture experiments ended up largely
> invisible and excluded from history, as now it might be time to be rather
> discreet about the possibilities uncovered then. Maybe it was a good thing
> for mycelium that it was largely invisible for so long, as nobody figured
> out how to monetize it.
>
> mw
>
> On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 2:16 AM, <dollyoko at thing.net> wrote:
>
> > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> >
> > dear shu lea and empyreans
> >
> > yes, finger fucking across platforms and waters, deep code luscious
> > moon brown stem the shadow of a venetian blind on summer body in
> > borrowed loft wiping sweat, not swiping left (write left alt write)
> > Floodnet!
> >
> > i'm immersing eyes into this generous mycelial conversation today
> > feeling the tendrils of one hundred minds
> >
> > 'powerful poetic gestures'
> > 'alternate sentiences'
> > 'the incomputable'
> > 'nature is not a system'
> > 'break all separations'
> > 'imps fuelling the real'
> > 'vernacular approach to infrastructure'
> > 't-shroom as family heritage and long-living family member'
> > 'i have a vast genetic network in me'
> > 'we begin to think like a forest'
> >
> > how to extend the intentional families we (of a certain age) created
> > in the 90s [while perhaps reading Bruce Stirling's Dead Media list, or
> > skiving off to PMCMoo or RiverMOO when LambdaMOO was down] before
> > other 'we(s)' were born
> >
> > Jonathan Marshall's book 'Living on Cybermind' might be one answer to
> > Ken's Q about how to capture the non-linear threaded lives
> >
> > i've been returning to build at LambdaMoo since around 2013, prompted
> > by projects such as Networked Art Forms and Tactical Magick Faerie
> > Circuits - instigated by the wonderful Nancy Mauro-Flude, and (equally
> > wonderful) Furtherfield's Beyond the Interface... I'm not sure what
> > the mycelial potential of such old platforms might be, I suspect
> > there's something though...... for example, a nascent project I'm
> > doing with Virginia Barratt and Alice Farmer takes as it starting point:
> >
> > -----------------------------------
> >
> > "A multi-platform artwork comprising a LambdaMOO environment
> > (multi-user domain object-oriented), performing avatars, improvised
> > performance, experimental hypertext fiction, cryptokitties on the
> > (ethereum) blockchain, and a hand-bound XenZine. The subject is the
> > construction of intentional family beyond blood and kind.
> >
> > We revisit LambdaMOO as a site for gender non-conforming
> > subjectivities to explore the production of xenofam and xenobodies,
> > outside of social re-production, and bring those practices to bear
> > upon the "real". Only a few years after the emergence of the WWW,
> > social networking habits were harnessed and stratified into machines
> > for the production of social capital and new affective forms of
> > extractivism within the paradigm of info-capitalism. Yet the outlier
> > LambdaMOO is still maintained by a small phreak family as a working
> > experiment, an enclave among other secessionist servers (caves,
> > sinkholes, hackpads, labyrinthine clouds) carving out space to platform
> lives of creative resistance, blasphemy and joy.
> >
> > The performing avatars, the unholy trinity of Witchmum, Mum 2.0 and
> > Precocious Meme Savant, have cooked, co-habited and coded as
> > becoming-kin to instantiate xenofam, building affective bonds through
> > which datablood flows. This queered approach to extensible and open
> > family platforms generates intentional spaces for the reconfiguration
> > of blood ties beyond blood types, and another mode of hexing Capital."
> >
> > --------------------
> >
> > I want to write more, but I need to buy bread as I can't wait the 12
> > hours for the wild yeasts to do their thing.
> > I will try to attract some xenofeminist and other spores this way
> > while thinking about how Ken's 'we no longer have roots, we have aerials'
> > might take a mycelial turn
> >
> >
> > Warmly, to all
> > doll fingers + witch thoughts, perhaps a spell cast from and to this
> > conversation, tomorrow
> >
> >
> >
> > > ----------empyre- soft-skinned
> > > space----------------------_________________________________
> > ______________
> > > empyre forum
> > > empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> > > http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> > http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> >
>
>
>
> --
>
> McKenzie Wark
> *Professor of Media and Culture*
> EUGENE LANG COLLEGE
> 65 w11th st, NEW YORK, NY 10011
>
> warkk at newschool.edu
> <http://www.newschool.edu/marketing-communication/email-signature.html#>
> T 212 229 5100 2241 / M 646 3697266 / @mckenziewark / room #456
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>

-- 

McKenzie Wark
*Professor of Media and Culture*
EUGENE LANG COLLEGE
65 w11th st, NEW YORK, NY 10011

warkk at newschool.edu
<http://www.newschool.edu/marketing-communication/email-signature.html#>
T 212 229 5100 2241 / M 646 3697266 / @mckenziewark / room #456
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