digital cartographers, narrative realization. image workers & pixel [re]searchers. emographers. knowpath explorers. space cadets. polytopians. in search of programmers.
notthisbody’s projects Polytopia The human species is rapidly and indisputably moving towards the technological singularity. The cadence of the flow of information and innovation in... Epiphanies A series of rambles by SpaceCollective members sharing sudden insights and moments of clarity.
Rambling is a time-proven way of thinking out loud,... Start your own revolution Catching up with the future.
All major institutions in the world today are grappling to come to terms with the internet. The entertainment...Now playingSpaceCollective Where forward thinking terrestrials share ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction.Introduction Featuring Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, based on an idea by Kees Boeke.
“Put simply: cities are like ant colonies are like software is like slime molds are like evolution is like disease is like sewage systems are like poetry is like the neural pathways in our brain. Everything is connected." - Patrick Pittman
This video is inspired, in part, by the ideas explored in David Deutsch’s new book, THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY. We hope it moves you.
In our work, we use the tools of editing: we juxtapose 'transcalar' imagery, cutting and overlapping the very small and the very large... From the nano to the galactic, stretching and compressing time, we feature time lapse to reveal the repetitive and recurring patterns across different scales of reality. The aim is to provide multiple perspectives all at once, whose simultaneous presentation might cause spontaneous epiphanies. “These patterns are omnipresent, but only when we see these patterns in a more compressed mode of presentation to we start to attend to them as such.” — This is KEY!
Paul Stamet's superb book, Mycelium Running, begins with a discussion of what Stamets calls the mycelial archetype. He compares the mushroom mycelium with the overlapping information-sharing systems that comprise the Internet, with the networked neurons in the brain, and with a computer model of dark matter in the universe. All share this densely intertwingled filamental structure.
A recent profile of Stephen Johnson on Dumbo Feather described his work like this:
“Johnson uses ‘The Long Zoom’ to define the way he looks at the world—if you concentrate on any one level, there are patterns that you miss. When you step back and simultaneously consider, say, the sentience of a slime mold, the cultural life of downtown Manhattan and the behaviour of artificially intelligent computer code, new patterns emerge."
On their own, these areas of study are fascinating. Together, a more profound view takes shape.
The article continues, "Put simply: cities are like ant colonies are like software is like slime molds are like evolution is like disease is like sewage systems are like poetry is like the neural pathways in our brain. Everything is connected.”
PERFORMING PHILOSOPHY:
Our stated goal is to re-ignite the art of the "performing philosophers" ... like Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller... A post from Wildcat here on Space Collective speaks about “thinkers who act as substantial agents of change, who drastically alter the infocologies they interact with, in the process transforming and meshing the different dimensions in which our minds operate.”
We care about the pleasures derived in forming new connections, mash-ups and innovative solutions for the next step in human evolution.
We are working to articulate our understanding through the creation of recombinant media mashups meant to epiphanize audiences——the creating and sharing of awe; "performance philosophy" in an age of collapsing boundaries and exponential creativity.
Artist Michael Garfield referred to it as "playing hopscotch across illusory divides in the intertidal zone between technology and spirituality, science and art, self and other, individual and collective.”
The director of the Imaginary Foundation described our work as “some kind of Ontological DJ'ing, recompiling the source code of western philosophy by mixing and mashing it up into a form of recombinant creativity, which (hopefully) elevates our understanding from the dry and prosaic, into the sensual and transcendent.”
“The goal is to prove a fresh framework and a new narrative to fill our old storytelling needs in our ever-increasing process of self-description.”
Information technologies have become instruments of mind expansion, sensorial scaffoldings that increase and augment our capacity to process greater amounts of information, allowing us to extract richer gradients of meaningful data about the world and our experience.
Whether its a telescope, a microscope or a marijuana joint, we need to think of these tools as aids, contact lenses through which we can see so much more than before.
In the digital dimension we use the term resolution. Certainly we can appreciate how much more can be 'revealed' by having higher resolution..... and technology offering complex visualizations literally ups the resolution of our internal and external perceptions .
Different Scales and perspectives of reality show how much of what we perceive is dictated by our point of view—literally by where we are and how we think. The most exhilarating realization, then, is that we all have the power to shape our experience by our linguistic and creative choices.
"A random scrap of information can trigger just the right conceptual collision. It’s hard to know which scrap might do the trick, but that’s the beauty of things like social networks, interconnectivity, and these kinds of media mashups — they constantly produce potential sparks, for free.” - Seth Godin
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A collaboration of /Jason Silva and /Notthisbody incorporating the work of:
Creation besides being the opposite of annihilation, is the constant state of readjustment, repurposing and in that way curating into a becoming - whether that be particles of thought, or feelings reflected in the bits of virtual representations. So we are just recontextualizing to reveal some patterns and point out to what is less obvious when we are glaring at the pieces from close and in their silo.
RealiTTY is a series of dense, insightful media meditations on language, information, reality, technology and transhumanism by Miles Hingston.
Introduction
Reality is a battle of opposing metaphors playing out/in the canvas of the collective mindscape. — Miles Hingston (The Author)
I hate to formalize things in this way, but this material is not designed to appease academic or scientific types necessarily because I choose not compete within the narrow boxes that they want to place people in, this will be discussed further in the next section. The nature of this material is purely speculative, but it does assume atleast some familiarity with the concepts described here. At the very least you do need to be open minded enough to challenge your perception of reality and entertain new ideas, a closed mind is a decaying mind.
To investigate anything is to admit prejudice, if I seek to prove the reality of my beliefs to other people then I betray my own doubts. To have an opinion on something requires me to overlook an infinite number of possibilities and to separate myself into the marginal and relative realm of rational thought.
To arrive at the truth once in your life you have to rid yourself of all the opinions that you have received and reconstruct anew from the foundation, all the systems of your knowledge. — René Descartes
As a final disclaimer, this material is in no way intended to be comprehensive and/or complete as it is very much a creative work and should be considered preliminary to your own further investigation. Information is neutral, it is neither good nor bad, do what you want with it.
Information and Simulated Reality
Digital physics sees everything as information, it provides a different way of describing what is happening at the quantum level. Seeing as the universe appears to be composed of elementary particles whose behaviour can be completely described by the quantum switches they undergo that implies that the universe as a whole can be described by bits. Every state is information and every change of state is a change in information. From this it can be said that the history of the universe is in effect a huge and ongoing quantum computation.
The Shape of Information
Information is like a "meta-substance" if you like (meta meaning beyond or above), yet it is embedded in the metaphor we choose to describe it by. Consider that the subatomic particles and quantum processes which scientists describe are what shamanistic and ancient cultures would consider spirits and deities.
Thoughts and Illusions
Think of the human brain like a radio transmitter/receiver, the brain is tuned in to a small spectrum of reality. It then further filters this in order to make our reality seem more congruent. My own experiences with psychedelics lead me to consider that there are different frequencies which the brain can tune in to and in doing so it is possible to pick up other "alien" realities, after all, all dimensions are occupying the same space. It is impossible for us to know an "objective reality", we are in a very real sense encased within a bubble, a cocoon, our nervous system is a buffer into the void of ultimate mystery, even science has it's limits in what it can explain phenomenologically.
Language and Reality
Saying that everything is information isn't very helpful for people who like to believe that there is a physical reality out there, it means essentially that the World is an abstraction, malleable by our interpretation and merely a collection of prevailing beliefs. Information as a linguistic object is a rather undiscerning metaphor. Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination, yet it is much more pervasive in everyday life than most people assume. Our ordinary conceptual system in terms of which we both think and act is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
Symbolic Representation
Robert Anton Wilson once remarked that "we are trapped in linguistic constructs, the only reality we know is the one we manufacture". We are immersed within a culture of symbols, as Gothe said "everything is a symbol", this woeful abstraction and sheathing of the reality destroys the outer World and fills the inner World with emptiness. The more involved this internal representational system is, the more distanced we are from the reality around us. Other connections and cognitive perspectives are inhibited and substituted by the alienation of symbolic representation.
Meme Morphing Machines
A meme is a cognitive or behavioural pattern that can be transmitted from one individual to another one, because of this they are often called "mind viruses". For example looking both ways before you cross the road is a meme. In general memes do not work on your rational mind but rather they affect your unconscious, emotionally entangled, decision-making processes. Another way of thinking about memes is as ideas or neoligisms that distribute themselves through a population. In a very real sense we are a collection of other peoples' minds. Memes become the entrenched thoughts and behavioural characteristics of our personalities. Since ideas get fixed in our minds they become our reality, often for our entire lives.
In the lack of scripted narrative - the fiction resembles reality - personal and collective. Using the form of an altered Census [not Demographic but Emographic] - reporting to none, the goal is to set out to seek faces, emotions, events, eyes, myths and stories, energies opposed to numbers, colors, institutionalized Gods and capitalist rituals.
4 Emographers set out for a 10 day round trip around Macedonia equipped with video and photo machines, ninja accessories, notebooks and pencils to find out what they will discover. The result is a feature film split in 5 parts – each a round trip on its own dwelling in a given theme. In the lack of scripted narrative – the fiction resembles reality – personal and collective. Using the form of an altered Census [not Demographic but Emographic] – reporting to none, the goal is to set out to seek faces, emotions, events, eyes, myths and stories, energies opposed to numbers, colors, institutionalized Gods and capitalist rituals. Set between two cycles of the presidential elections of 2009 – combining interrogation and torture of the open lens we go and see how the people live. In a country where the contrast of social landscapes, mutation of principles, coloring of minds of the masses, modification of recent history is an old news waiting to be herd and talked about, we travel and seek the imperfection of the moments with which we build a topographic essay on Macedonia. Dissecting the genealogy of power to reveal the deep wounds and substitute them with an open constructive dialogue and effective action.
Having participated in the development of the Polytopia Project since its outset here on SpaceCollective, my primary focus and passion has been to make inroads into conceptualizing, innovating and developing the tools/interfaces/utlities/system architectures that facilitate and contribute to the emergence of a polytopian mind habitat.
Together with Gavin Keech (@gavinkeech), Gunther Sonnenfeld (@goonth), Brendan Howley (@brendanhowley) and our selfs (@notthisbody), we have formed an entity called ThinkState - a creative innovation consultancy that is building UBIQUID.US - values-driven creative tools for the collaborative economy.
With awareness of inspiration stemming from the Polytopia Project within all of us involved, we wish to publish the statement below, contributed to be each of us, assembled based on our shared affinities and values.
The intention is that this statement can be hacked, examined, ripped apart, adopted, adapted by any and all who find use for it - so that perhaps we can define a kind of mutual commitment statement suited to a Polytopian perspective.
These core characteristics and principles are strongly inspired from the Polytopia presentation and map that were created in November 2010.
As well, I would like to thank and credit Spaceweaver, whose text I have taken the liberty of adapting under the heading "How we desire to be free".
We welcome any and all who would like to join the conversation around these affinities.
THIS STATEMENT is made this _______ day of ______, 2011, to set forth the stated intention of [entities involved] to continue in a collaborative and cooperative fluid fractal organism (FFO) - for profit and social benefit around their common affinities.
This letter sets forth the vision statement and key characteristics under which the entities of the FFO intend to develop a partnership agreement and act from a business perspective.
Key Characteristics
Key characteristics of the ThinkState FFO include:
[entities involved] will endeavor to cooperate with one another to develop aesthetic interfaces and utilities that
transition and evolve current socio-economic models
lead to the emergence of collaborative marketplaces
co-create value through the leveraging of affinities around shared narratives
monetize that value through ethical re-sale and incentivization of personal data
volumize and visualize that data via immersive technologies
enhance emergent properties and multiplicity
contribute and reciprocate with the open-source community
...create a ground of engagement for entities to interact and nourish one another: the coordinating layer of both the web of our strategic partnerships and the web itself
Guiding Principles
The principles of the cooperative relationship are:
All initiatives will be tested towards their potential to mutually and reciprocally enhance entities
By all means practicable, all initiatives will strengthen co-emergent interests
An ambience of partner cooperation will allow for mutually agreed-upon concurrent agendas
Critical decisions will be undertaken in an ambience of openness and directed dialogue
All value co-creation will be undertaken in an ambience of transparency
These principles we place before personalities.
How we desire to be free
Technology offers the possibility of analyzing and directing the mental processes involved in computing our choices towards an optimized state of freedom.
By developing interfaces and utilities, we might find greater degrees of personal and collaborative freedom not only by means of increased computing resources and information access, but also by upgrading the very way we compute.
If we gain sufficient understanding of how mental processes arise, we can begin to devise general methods of ridding them from unnecessary redundancies and increasing their aesthetic and creative qualities.
This is our mission: to utilize the sciences of the mind, providing us with powerful insights and tools to help us optimize individual and collaborative freedoms.
Termination
When we no longer feel we share common affinities, we must arrange to fluidly be able to move past that block to continue with the affinities that we do still have in common, if we so desire.
Concurrent agendas are possible by transparent best practices, which in turn respect the vision that we have set forward.
No longer sharing specific affinities does not render collaboration mutually exclusive.
A recognition of these characteristics and principles is the bedrock of our collaboration: we will, each of us, make best efforts to continue to evolve those characteristics and principles, guided by balancing what is best for all of us against what is best for our company.
Entire Understanding
This Statement contains the mutual understanding between the sentient entities with respect to its subject matter and supersedes any prior understandings and agreements between them with respect thereto.
#Inforhythms are an experiment in aural representations of annotations or metadata of information. In collaboration with Gabe Noel of Vosotros (which by the way has some great music, all licensed Creative Commons, we have started initial experiments of assigning tonal values to specific sets of metadata.
We have started by assigning aural information to the elements of IEML (information economy meta language). IEML is a representational language created by Pierre Levy (@plevy) that can act as a coordinating language between multiple ontologies. It is a system to represent and express facets of our subjectively experienced, unique worldview. Since it is meant to be understood by a computer (and is expressed in a notational syntax), the core elements combine exponentially and opens the possibility (theoretically at this stage) to compute the semantic distance between meanings.
We are at the beginning of our explorations into #inforhythms – a potentially retooling of our auditory perception through the creation of aural metadata representational systems, with the intent to create usable AR (or #aurec) interfaces that allow us to perceive, experience and interact with the multiple auras of metadata always surrounding us. This in turn opens up one vector of telesynaesthetic language.
I had the pleasure to meet several other polytopians in the flesh recently at the TransVision 2010 conference in Milan. It was both an excuse to get together after working for so long on the net, as well as a chance to suss out current ideas, attitude, approaches and thought happening in the transhumanist community.
Although we were not initially going to present, after the first day we felt that the Polytopia Project fills a void of sorts...a ground of engagement for all the ideas, initiatives, visions, predictions and prophecies that were spoken about there - a common ground of mutual respect.
We created a map, over the next two days, and gardened it until we felt comfortable with a distilled presentation of some of the fundamentals of what we agreed a polytopia(s) to be.
This map can be seen as continually evolving - as the conversation continues to grow around these concepts we will be modifying and adding in more layers to the map, including multiple aesthetic representations of the content.
Memetic Computing covers the general aspects of population-based problem-solving methods that are enhanced with some form of cultural-analog mechanism. For instance, Memetic Computing involves also software ecology. That is, studies of the enormous number of software projects are shedding light on how software development takes place and the many social and technical issues related to this fundamental XXI century activity. Related emerging trends that also fall squarely within the remit of Memetic Computing are search based software engineering including the very latest trends on software self-healing, self-assembly and self-management. Memetic Computing is thus an emergent discipline that seeks to distil principles derived both from nature and human societies (i.e. memes and self-organizing mechanisms) as to bring forth the creation of so called Living Technology. The main areas of scientific interest covered by Living Technology, and upon which Memetic Computing would have in near future a definite impact, is the interface between nano-bio-technology and information technology with the ultimate aim of creating new, novel production systems with the properties of self-organization, self-assembly, evolution, learning and, more generally, adaptive complexity. It is also essential to remark that Memetic Computing is also having an impact far beyond technical systems. For example, policy makers and businesses are using memetic strategies (previously called viral marketing) to influence public opinion and deliver effective change at a massive scale through the harnessing and leveraging of memetic concepts operating from small, perhaps unnoticeable, interactions. That is, Memetic computing is playing a key role in the design of bottom-up strategies for the achievement of large societal and technological changes. In this scenario, memetic simulations play a key role in the modeling of strategies and their potential outcomes. - The Emergent Technologies Task Force on Memetic Computing
what role does chaos play in this process? the existence of free radicals generates new trajectories. how can we design for chaordic emergent synchronicity?
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