[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]
Shu Lea Cheang
shulea at earthlink.net
Tue Jun 26 04:37:42 AEST 2018
ok
on how mycelium/mushroom as a figure ... the mycelium cult would wants
to dive in and argue forever , but quickly, we quote-
My mecelium network is nearly immortal, only the sudden toxification of
a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out… all my
mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyper light communication across
space and time. - Terence McKenna, The Mushnoon speaks
I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature.
Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing
membranes. …..The mycelium stays in constant molecular communication
with its environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses
to complex challenges. - Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms
Can Help Save the World
We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological
ruination….. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think
about collaborative survival. It is time to pay attention to mushroom
picking. Not that this will save us— but it might open our imaginations.
- Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The mushroom at the end of the world : on the
possibility of life in capitalist ruins
This answers back to [week 1] how we got started... interesting we flash
back to the 90s here..
bring up all nodes and bolts... loosen and to be fastened...
damn, and dollyoko are finger tight!!
over
sl
On 25/06/18 20:06, warkk wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
> 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
> <mailto: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
> <mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
> <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> <mailto: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
> <mailto: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
> <mailto: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
> <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
> > > http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu>
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
> > http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> <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 <mailto:warkk at newschool.edu>
> <http://www.newschool.edu/marketing-communication/email-signature.html#
> <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
> <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <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
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