Living the lives of fiction today

An exercise in seeing what's not there?




Worth fullscreening with sound (follow the link).

Fri, May 16, 2008  Permanent link

Temporal hypertext

Thoughts on hypertext and time extension (continuing a discussion between obvious and meika):

Instances of hypertext are time-extended, of course. Wikipedia is always changing, different now to how it was and will be. However, that is not temporal extension represented to us by the medium; rather, the medium is time-extended along with us, so we see subjective moments of it. That is, Wikipedia, now, is not a representation its temporal progress any more than I am a representation of my own temporal progress.

All material things are temporally extended, but some representations have temporality built in. Film, for instance, is temporally extended itself, and uses that property to represent temporally extended things. So as I see and hear a seal barking at the cinema, I understand that temporal progression using just the same faculties that I use to understand real seals actually barking. (This line of thinking I associate with Noel Carroll, although I actually read it years ago in this book by Gregory Currie. [In keeping with the mind-mapping theme, I have left in my Google Books search string for your enjoyment!])

However, in film, as in comic strips, our interpretation of the time represented is dependent on some conventions. For example, the next scene might be only a second away, but represent events three weeks later than those represented in this scene. (You may even be lucky to have such realistic temporal ordering - consider Pulp Fiction, or, preferably, another more arty film that used temporally disjointed narrative before Pulp Fiction and makes me seem cooler to you for having referenced it.)

So there's temporal extension like film's, which is part of the medium and of the representation, and there's temporal extension like painting's (or comic strips'), which is part of the medium but not the representation. That is, a painting is all there now, but you can read time's passing off it. A film is only partly there now - just like the periods of time which it might represent.

I think hypertext's temporal extension is more like that of painting than of film. However, one thing that is built into hypertext - that is part of its representation and its medium - is sequence. I can dictate that you must see this page before the main site, unless you click another link, which I may or may not give you. Navigation around the overall map is not totally free. We have to follow the links; we can't just warp around the place. So ordering is built in, which is a key part of temporality.

(So what does this link mean?)

For meika and obvious: back to the discussion

Thu, May 1, 2008  Permanent link

The concrete realm
Project: The great enhancement debate

Two realms of self-enhancement

In three parts:
Introduction
The concrete realm
The informational realm (coming soon)

We can't be concretely unenhanced. We may only vary our degree of enhancement within the concrete realm. For this reason, the option for less concrete enhancement is not especially radical.

Donna Haraway said we are all cyborgs.
We are creature-stick hybrids.
Societal institutions imply a conception of their societies' members which reflects this.


Explanation:
Haraway's cyborg theory includes the assertion that technological artifacts are extensions of the body. It's easy to see in the case of a prosthetic leg, but consider also a walking stick, a shoe, skin cream applied to the foot, and toe-nail clippers. These are plug-ins, adding functionality, classed with sticks picked up by chimps. If these are extensions of our bodies, and if our bodies make up our selves (at least partly), then humans are creature-stick hybrids.

Two notes here:

1. It is tempting to say that modern humans are creature-stick hybrids, but it is probably all humans. Tools came before humans, and probably all humans have used tools. So, in fact, the stick has a longer heritage than this creature - the creature may even be seen as a parasite.

2. Since a stick is an extension of the body, it is part of the body, so it can be extended by another stick. Consider the rubber cap added to the bottom of the walking stick, the shoelace on the shoe, the plastic seal on the end of the shoelace. So, following this through, the no-drip stand and travel pouch of your essential wine aerator are material extensions of your being. Remember that when you click to buy.


The Professor's invention for peeling potatoes by W. Heath Robinson

Lastly in this explanation, societies are human things, so they have embedded in them the notion of a creature-stick hybrid. That needs some spelling out.

Generally, societies' structures betray presuppositions about their populations. For a simplistic example, when public amenities are provided in a community, it is supposed that they should be accessible to all people, as far as possible. Old-fashioned thinking had it that people were stair-climbing things, so there was little hesitation in placing steps at the access-points to, e.g., a public library. These days, the common conception of people is broader. Some people are not stair-climbing things, and so if we are to cater to them all - within reason - then we should not use only stairs, when there are other options. The conception of the community-member embedded in a stairs-only building presupposes stair-climbing ability.

A building is a very literal example of a societal structure, but the presupposition that humans are creature-stick hybrids is perhaps clearest in more abstract structures. Another simple example: laws in developed societies are built on human interaction, but discourage public nudity. So members of those societies are assumed to be persons with clothes, and clothes are, in my sense, sticks. Furthermore,

• many public spaces are not safely accessible without footwear;
• you are expected to know what to do with received mail;
• there are canned goods;
• you must trade with money;
• you will be required to open a door today.

So we are all unavoidably 'enhanced' in the concrete realm, in the sense that we are creatures enhanced by sticks. Really, though, enhancement doesn't come into it; we are creature-stick hybrids. Humans are all enhanced creatures, we are not all enhanced humans. Where you draw the line of normality, marking the beginning of megahumanity (I don't want to say superhumanity), will always be open to discussion. In years to come, some humans may choose the high-dexterity, robotic, add-on limbs, although some of them will have just one. Others will just stick to the fleshy basics. Many will not be able to afford to choose. It will be as it is with cars these days. Condemned to the bus, am I 'a natural'?

Since we cannot be without our sticks, the 'naturals' can't be picked out in the concrete realm. But, since our acceleration into the informational realm has jumped so recently, we can see some people beginning a way of being that is still almost untouched by others.

continue to The informational realm (Coming soon!)

Note:
I chose the Heath Robinson illustration because I am fan, and because his machines push the idea of 'sticks' as corporal extensions to the absurd edges. However, that's a good test and I think the idea still holds together. I must also take this opportunity to share, in the same spirit, the best thing I have seen on YouTube, since this may be the only time it will be even barely relevant. See these 'Pitagora suitchi' - 'Pythagorus switches'. The ultimate sticks?



Final note (of confession):
This video made me laugh out loud and clap my hands several times. In my study on my own. Is this appropriate behaviour? Several members of the target audience, ages aggregated, would not match my years.

Related links:

Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto
A Wired interview with Haraway from way back
The social model of disability

Mon, Apr 28, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: The great enhancement debate

Two realms
Project: The great enhancement debate

Two realms of self-enhancement

In three parts:
Introduction
The concrete realm
The informational realm (coming soon)

The three human 'species' imagined in the project description are as follows:

• Genetically modified people
• Bionically enhanced people
• Un-enhanced people

And we might want to add the combination of those first two:

• Genetically and bionically enhanced people

This little series is about the bionically enhanced.

There is a sense, much discussed already, in which we are all bionically enhanced to some extent. Al wrote as much in January, mentioning our phone-projected voices, iPod-jingled eardrums, and car-extended mobility. This kind of bionic enhancement is indeed prevalent already. It is the magnification, extension and expansion of ourselves, sometimes by displacement, as in the case of the telephoner's voice or the rescue worker's roving robot. It is our corporeal growth into other parts of the world, or our functional enhancement in dealing with the physical world. It is the enhancement of our bodies: it is growth in the concrete realm.

However, the spreading and displacement in the concrete realm should be distinguished from our bionically enabled growth into the informational realm - the unplacement of aspects of ourselves. Examples of growth into the informational realm are some types of computer-enhanced memory (which al mentioned), internet-presented personality (like here, e.g.), and electoral roll-recorded existence. These elaborations are easier to detach from our 'basic' selves, since they are augmentations of our non-corporeal selves. However, the informational dimensions of our beings are becoming more and more important to our identities.


For example, you might think you are a student at a university because you go to that university and you study there: those two things are quite essential. However, the university will tell you that you are a student there if and only if their database records such a fact. So, in their terms, you may be a student and never even go to campus or open a book. You may produce excellent work using their facilities and under the guidance of their professors, but still not be a student, excellent or otherwise. This kind of record of someone's status is part of their presence in the informational realm. Importantly, it is this presence that affords certain statuses and privileges in the 'real' world, away from the records and databases. Your CV is boosted by having been recorded as a student more than by actually having been one, so you are more employable with that record than with the wit but no paper to show it.

The increase in the importance of our informational selves might be because those informational facets of persons are (not entirely, but largely) dependent on large-scale and intricate social interactions of our this modern era, and the persistent, shared informational spaces that enable those interactions. (That is, rapidly manipulable, parallel accessible, recorded information.)

The Great Enhancement Debate's project description predicts that unenhanced "naturals" may be taking a radical stance. It has already been suggested elsewhere that the "natural" stance can't really be taken because we can't form a meaningful notion of the natural. I think that view is right when we look at enhancement in the concrete realm, but less so when we consider it in the informational realm. It is impossible to frame a clear and absolute notion of the corporeally unnatural or supernatural. However, whilst it may be that there are no informationally natural humans in today's society (or at least in a near future's society), we can see what one would be (and what they have been).

Continue to The concrete realm

Mon, Apr 28, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: The great enhancement debate

Like information, built
Project: The Total Library

I added a comment to this post today, about photographs of libraries. I reproduce it here.

I love pictures of libraries stacked with books. Especially big libraries.

I love

• the regularity of the arrangement of volumes
• the desperate and constant reigning into order of their slightly less regular shapes (by shelves)
• the knowledge that inside each one is yet another, rougher, feigned neatness that has been squeezed first from the head of a person who has made to himself or herself sense of the world
• and behind it all, at the beginning, all the raw, jumbled ways things are.

And after all these layers of interpretation and categorising and cataloguing, we have an enormous, incomprehensibly comprehensive list of perceived or imagined states of affairs, almost as bizarre as our starting point, overwhelming, but navigable by its artifice. Then we take a snapshot.

When future generations ask about the old libraries, people will have to say:

"like information, built."

I love library pictures so much that I took some myself, then I photographed the pictures.

33 pictures of the Edward Boyle Library by Robokku

Tue, Apr 22, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: The Total Library

Project proposal / cry for help: SC music forum

Are you there? Can you help me?

I like hearing music from Space Collective, especially whilst composing posts. Is there any way to find music posted by members?

If not, it might work in a project space, in which all the posts would include music - ideally members' own.

To accommodate people's inclination to write about the music - but in musicless posts - there could be one sticky post where members could add links to their own cargo's silent posts in the comments.

The aim would be to have [my own private] an open (and hopefully exhaustive) library of the original music on Space Collective.

Is there a way?

(Or - quick fix! - if you are a musician and you have posted music, can you tell me where it is?)

Tue, Apr 15, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: music

'The Mezzanine' by Nicholson Baker
Project: The Total Library

This is a short book. Sounds good when I put it like that, doesn't it? However, much as its plot covers a short space of time, but is deceptively epic, the 100 or so pages are deceptively dense.


Don't want to read all this? See it condensed in the comments of For the wannabe bookworm!
I present four short items to introduce this novel to you. The first is the following short paragraph which should show what has lead me to recommend it.

The Mezzanine approaches the intricacies of the everyday in such a way that its philosophical themes may be brought to mind as you go about your daily business long after you have read it. Perhaps forever. I don't know. So far, I have been going about six months, and still can't tie my shoelaces irreflectively. On the other hand, as will become clear shortly, it may offer you nothing at all. (If you have no soul!)

The second and third items I present are the following two published responses to the novel, which I think are particularly informative when taken together.

Faintly amusing for about ten pages then increasingly, numbingly dull: the moment-by-moment thoughts of a 25-ish office worker during his lunch hour—with an unabashed, verbose focus on the most trivial, everyday activities. The narrator's molasses-like stream-of-consciousness begins with the half-pint of milk he is carrying—which leads to a two-page footnote on the differences between paper straws and plastic straws. (Similarly ungainly asides are strewn throughout). The lunchtime purchase of shoelaces triggers meditations on broken laces, CVS stores, and socks. Soon there are memories of childhood shoe-typing—and other "major advances" in life: the day the narrator discovered that sweeping was fun; the day he ordered a rubber return-address stamp; and the day his "life as an adult" began, when, at 23, he figured out how to put on deodorant after being fully dressed. Then, when he rides an escalator, two chapters of escalator thoughts ensue, as the narration reaches new peaks of self-consciousness. ("So I want now to do two things: to set the escalator to the mezzaine against a clean mental background as something fine and worth my adult time to think about, and to state that while I did draw some large percentage of joy from the continuities that the adult escalator ride established with childhood escalators, I will try not to glide by on the reminiscential tone. . .") And there are also musings on ice-cube trays, Jiffy Pops, earplugs, vending machines, Marcus Aurelius, Disney cartoons, Penguin paperbacks, and—with a welcome bit of ribald energy—corporate bathrooms. (The narrator overcomes public-urinal embarrassment by "pretending to urinate on the other person's head.")

(From Kirkus Reviews - first review on Google Books)

And the other:

Everyone who read Nicholson Baker's marvelous first novel, ''The Mezzanine,'' wondered what he could possibly do for an encore. Packed with fascinatingly digressive footnotes on everything from the shape of staplers to the buoyancy of straws, ''The Mezzanine'' was a brief, Swiftian, Proustian tale about a seemingly unremarkable lunch hour in the life of a big-city office worker, as well as an impressively precise commentary on the nature of memory, the esthetics of industrial design, the boredom of white-collar work and the sources of life's small, sustaining pleasures. It was a whole book seemingly made up of the best parts of Updike, those moments of acutely described visceral perception that remind us what it's like to live in late-20th-centuryJU America.

(From the New York Times - fourth review on Google Books)

My final point of reference for you is my own mentions of The Mezzanine in a post I just wrote.

I was a little disappointed to discover, in conversation with Dad, that our thing-in-common was not as in-common as I had thought. For instance, he had never read a favourite section of mine. It was the two-page footnote imagining microscopic explorers investigating up-close the histories of erosion of the grooves in records, and then comparing them to the findings from a different miniaturised expedition into the grooves left behind in ice by skates. He had not read it, he said, because his attention had been too strongly bound by the relaying, in another two-page footnote, of stapler designers' decades-long, slavish following of locomotive form factors, which they reproduced in functional officeware precisely and consistently twenty years behind the fashions of the trainyard. (That is to say that 1960s staplers are shaped like 1940s trains, and 1970s staplers are shaped like 1950s trains, and so on.)

(From my Nicholson Baker on Wikipedia)

I hope the above bits serve as a nice introduction to a wonderful novel which is easily as enlightening as you allow it to be. Strangely, I think its appeal is best captured by the first review I showed. If the author of that review thought he had pinpointed the failings of The Mezzanine, then there is surely no way to turn him around on the matter.

See also my super-abridgment in For the wannabe bookworm in The Total Library.

Thu, Apr 10, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: Books, Nicholson Baker
Sent to project: The Total Library

Nicholson Baker on Wikipedia

I got the Guardian today, but my eyes didn't even reach the fold. They didn't even reach the date. The top corner advertises page 4 of G2, the comment and features section:

Nicholson Baker
Wikipedia took over my life

Thrill. This paper was supposed just to be something to prop my gaze against while the sandwich went in. Now I was actually set up for an enjoyable lunchtime. A good surprise. I called my dad.

To me, Nicholson Baker was a man who wrote a short novel, quirkily interesting, in the 1980s, then disappeared into obscurity. I thought that of him because a little while ago I read The Mezzanine. It was a novel. It was short. I found it quirkily interesting. The cover was classically 1980s-styled. When I finished it, I heard nothing more of Nicholson Baker. I had not heard of him before I read it either. So I pictured him as having disappeared into obscurity by, say, 1986, leaving behind a wacky story of shoelaces, milk cartons, and the great paper vs. plastic drinking straw debate.

I read The Mezzanine on my dad's recommendation. He is in product design. An academic. I could see why he'd been pushing it on his students, probably since the 80s. I loved the book. It is a recent thing-in-common between us, so I called him now, sandwich still sticker-sealed. He shared my thrill. Nicholson Baker? Wikipedia? Well... He would set out to buy the Guardian right way, he said. However, I was a little disappointed to discover, in conversation with Dad, that our thing-in-common was not as in-common as I had thought. For instance, he had never read a favourite section of mine. It was the two-page footnote imagining microscopic explorers investigating up-close the histories of erosion of the grooves in records, and then comparing them to the findings from a different miniaturised expedition into the grooves left behind in ice by skates. He had not read it, he said, because his attention had been too strongly bound by the relaying, in another two-page footnote, of stapler designers' decades-long, slavish following of locomotive form factors, which they reproduced in functional officeware precisely and consistently twenty years behind the fashions of the trainyard. (That is to say that 1960s staplers are shaped like 1940s trains, and 1970s staplers are shaped like 1950s trains, and so on.) In short, he hadn't actually read the whole book. But he could see its appeal, and so could I. Strangely, I think the following review sums up my affection for it.

Faintly amusing for about ten pages then increasingly, numbingly dull: the moment-by-moment thoughts of a 25-ish office worker during his lunch hour—with an unabashed, verbose focus on the most trivial, everyday activities.

(From the first review showing on Google Books)

So I hope you can understand my anticipation as I thumbed for the G2, phone now on hook, sandwich bag open: The Mezzanine addressed only the whole world, Wikipedia is a much bigger subject. I was ready for the minutiae of the massive, the intricacies of the infinite.

The article was charming. Dressed up like a Wikipedia entry, with blue hyperlinked footnotes, which made for a passable gag in pulpy newsprint. I took that first impression back to the office, eating on the move. Having chatted with dad, I didn't have time to read the article until later.



Naturally, I sneaked in some research whilst at the desk, alt-tabbing discreetly between Excel and Wikipedia's Baker entry for some indulgent scene-setting. I read his publications list. Sure enough, The Mezzanine appeared in the 80s, but, contrary to my egocentric version of events, it was the beginning of a string of notable novels and non-fictions, occasionally cheering critics and perturbing best-seller lists. Included were:

Vox (1992)
A phone-sex taboo-toucher (strangely described in the wiki as "disappointingly unpornographic").

Check-in (2004)
A story concerning a psychotic-sounding fellow who plots the assassination of George W by unworkably stupid means, but principally concerning his conversation with a friend about his arrival at such plans.

U and I: Tall Tales (1998)
Non-fiction. This one inspired me because it apparently involves an investigation and analysis of John Updike's works, written without reading those works at all at any point after the commencement of the project. This caught my imagination so much that I have written this post in exactly that way. As a result, this list and my earlier references to The Mezzanine are certainly inaccurate. (In particular, these book titles escape me now, so I have fabricated them.)

Decimo: Book destruction in US libraries 1972-1986 (2001)
Non-fiction. This one brought to mind some thoughts of Rene's, in a post I read yesterday. He was wondering about the impact of the openness and accessibility of information on printed books and our attitudes towards them. (Sorry, Rene, if you read this: I've not reread your post either, so I may misrepresent you.) In Decimo, Baker actually traced the histories of print publications abandoned by librarians and tagged for destruction in the microfiching frenzy of the 70s and 80s. (Apparently there was a microfiching frenzy in the 70s and 80s.)

I was sure then, in light of those last two books on the list, that Nicholson Baker was a man with a high regard for subjective impressions of things (Tall Tales) and a love for the history and future of information collation (Decimo). He was a man whose reaction to Wikipedia I wanted to witness. By five, I knew this G2 article was going to be a treat. I stacked the day's spread of paperwork at one side of the desk, took the supplement from my bag and laid it in the space. Then I changed my mind. I would read it at home, savour it. I bagged it again and put on my coat, clipped my trousers for the cycle.

Actually, no. My mind was perfectly primed, I thought. This was the moment to read it. I sat at my desk again, still coated and clipped, fished out the paper and flicked to page 4. I had been right at lunchtime: the Wikipedian stylings really were charming. I read the title and lead-in again - I had got that far before. Then it occurred to me that my readiness to enjoy this article had only increased since lunchtime. The anticipation was sort of stewing, the flavours of expectation spreading and intensifying, I thought, which image made me realise I was hungry. I would read it at home. Then I could eat first: might as well add the satisfaction of a full stomach. Besides, my research had so effectively confirmed the high probability that the article would be utterly gripping, that I could actually plot a related post for Space Collective on the cycle home. Decided. I repacked and left.

Bike locked; house clothes on; work clothes pressed; feeding accomplished; feet up. The thrill of knowing I was going to read a good article; the bliss of a happily distracted digestive system. That is what it's all about. That would be the high point of the day. The truth was, I decided, I didn't even need to read the article.

So I didn't.

If you want to, it's here.

Thu, Apr 10, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: Books, internet, egocentrism, Nicholson Baker, Wikipedia

My narratives narrative

In The Total Library, Rene posted a really nice bit about narratives - grand ones. He mentioned Obvious, and a post of his, and it drew a comment from me. But then the comment got to be very long, and I felt rude clogging up that nice post, and the Library. So I put it here, out of the way.

I could have spent this time introducing you to the discussion, but I didn't. Sorry. Here's a lead in: Rene said,

"Because narrative tends to be closely related to the Humanities, the discipline’s stories are much wider spread."

And so without more ado...

I'm not sure that the humanities' stories are more widely spread than the sciences'. I can't decide. I've already admitted that I'm a bad reader. Anyway, the way I understand the idea of 'narrative' in Obvious' writings leads me to think that people are put off from creating scientific narratives, simply because they don't have the expert knowledge that they think they need in order to create them. I'll try to explain that.

Perhaps many people see the ground covered by the humanities as accessible, comprehensible territory, whereas science is popularly understood to be complicated and for experts. Yet nowadays Western society is dominated by scientific images, ideas, and metaphors. Simplified versions of scientific notions like evolution, relativity, progress and explanation are adopted piecemeal and applied and misapplied in politics, the press, advertising - that may be the best example - and even back in the humanities.

For me, a narrative - in this case, the narrative(s) of a discipline, but I think any narrative - is not a history. It's not a true story; it's not just what happened, in order. It is just the kind of thing that is understood, at a very basic level, by humans. We make ourselves stories of the world that account for the various pieces of knowledge that we need to tessellate. As such, narratives could perhaps be large-scale things, composed by a community and so existing in some sense 'outside' of the individuals of that community. (Like, e.g., accepted common knowledge about a subject. [I'm not sure about this idea, personally, but there's room for it.]) However, seeing them this way, narratives are certainly things held by individuals - individuals' versions of events, 'told' to themselves in the act of mentally grasping their subject matter.

I get the feeling - and I'm speaking as a non-scientist, in case you hadn't guessed - that in practice, in modern society, people have to build a narrative of science on or around the very few fragments that they (think they) have actually understood. Hence the distorted accounts of scientific ideas that prevail outside the scientific community, when accounts of them are given. In contrast, things like literature, philosophy, and maybe even history, are (I think) typically seen as being more accessible to the layperson. Therefore, laypeople (think they) understand more of the subjects they turn their minds to and so have more of a pre-existing foundation on which to build their narratives.

I'm not sure that could account for a big difference in spread between the narratives of science and the humanities, but maybe it's a useful or interesting analysis all the same. (I certainly don't think I have answered the question, "Why are there no films about Tesla?")

I had an idea about books and the internet, which I was heading towards, but I didn't get there. Maybe something for a post in itself...

Wed, Apr 9, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: egocentrism, art and science, narrative

For the wannabe bookworm
Project: The Total Library

I am a bad reader. Slow, ill-disciplined, with a wandering mind.

I will rarely manage a whole book.

I will rarely manage a whole review of a book.

For those out there like me - and for me - will you please imply your endorsement of a book in the following format?

1. Two-sentence summary —> 2. One-sentence summary —> 3. One-word summary

I'll start, with Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus:

• "If we were to talk about the relation between language and the world - as philosophers would like to - we would have to step outside of language, and so would not be able to talk. So the propositions of philiosophy, this book included, are nonsense."


• "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."


• "Shhh!"

Mon, Apr 7, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: Books, narrative, Nicholson Baker, Wittgenstein
Sent to project: The Total Library