Dreaming of Gravity

Two of my most vivid dreams:

One: I'm at a windy East-coast beach following a group of family and friends. As I climb a dune I feel my feet loosing their hold on the earth. I start to lift up, now gently grasping at the sand with my hands. In a state of intrigued bewilderment.

Two: I'm at an empty German train station, waiting with my mom and brother. In the next moment I am as flat as a sheet of paper and floating across the tracks.

Flight. Who hasn't at some point had some variation of these dreams. Or looked in awe at a bird in mid air, or sat in an airplane and looked all the way down.

However, flight - with all its powerful emotions and symbolism - is nothing but the temporary escape from gravity. Our dreams of flight are merely dreams of escape from this strange elastic relationship to the earth (every time we lift a limb, it is pulled right back down) - escape from this elemental force that plants us so firmly on our feet. I am shocked at how heavy my body is. Everything is so heavy. We dream of floating because we don't want to fall down ever again.

There are a lot of posts on spacecollective regarding gravity. For those of you in the Los Angeles area and interested in the topic, I recently went to the Gravity Art Show at Telic which showcased about 30 conceptual art videos - playing in a constant loop, all gathered under one tidy roof and jammed on top of one another on industrial steel shelving. Walking into the space is a sight and sound to behold - and you soon find yourself moving from monitor to monitor, watching and hearing cement blocks, people, flower petals, television sets, fluorescent light bulbs and the like fall and fly endlessly through the air... before making inevitable impact.

You're allowed to make your own connections and find relationships between the works - but the most important thing your realize is that the same force that's causing all this crazy chaos is acting on every aspect of your being at every moment in time and making you wish you could just for one instant... float.

Fri, Mar 14, 2008  Permanent link

Reading Borges Reading
Project: The Total Library

This post is meant for those who are in the strange habit of finishing what they start. All others need not read further.

In With Borges Alberto Manguel describes his childhood experiences reading aloud for the then blind and always great author and book lover, Jorge Luis Borges. It's a very quick, one-sit read. I've put together a few excerpts which lead to a wonderfully paradoxical revelation about Borges in the last sentences.

From my very first visits Borges's apartment seemed to me to exist outside of time, or rather, in a time made up of his literary experiences [...] These were his points of reference, his history and his geography: the present seldom intruded. For a man who loved to travel but who could not see the places he visited [...], he was singularly uninterested in the physical world except as representations of his readings. The sand of the Sahara or the water of the Nile, the coast of Iceland, the ruins of Greece and Rome, all of which he touched with delight and awe, simply confirmed the memory of a page of the Arabian Nights or the Bible, of Njals Saga or of Homer and Virgil. All these "confirmations" he brought back to his apartment.
[...]
Sometimes he himself chooses a book from the shelves. He knows, of course, where each volume is housed and he goes to it unerringly. But sometimes he finds himself in a place where the shelves are not familiar, in a foreign bookstore for instance, and here something uncanny happens. Borges will pass his hands over the spines of the books, as if feeling his way over the rugged surface of a map in relief and, even if he does not know the territory, his skin seems to read the geography for him. Running his fingers over books he has never opened before, something like a craftsman's intuition will tell him what the book is that he is touching, and he is capable of deciphering titles and names which he certainly cannot read. [...] I can vouch for the fact that there exists a relationship between this old librarian and his books which the laws of physiology would judge impossible.
[...]
For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end. Books restored the past. "In time," he said to me, "every poem becomes an elegy." He had no patience with faddish literary theories and blamed French literature in particular for concentrating not on books but on schools and coteries. Adolfo Bioy Casares once told me that Borges was the only man he knew who, concerning literature, "never gave in to convention, custom or laziness". He was a haphazard reader who felt content, at times, with plot summaries and articles in encyclopedias, and who confessed that, even though he had never finished Finnegans Wake, he happily lectured on Joyce's linguistic monument. He never felt obliged to read a book down to the last page.

Much to the ridicule of my friends, I rarely read a book down to the last page myself. In these passages I've found solace regarding my reading habits and ammo against my friends' taunts. If the first few chapters and plot summaries are good enough for Borges, they're good enough for me damnit.

Wed, Mar 5, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: The Total Library

A Crash in Civilization.

A crash in civilization is an instance when people (either individuals under government control or elements of government) stop performing their expected functions and also stop responding to other parts of society. This can lead to drastically different ends:


madness


spiritual enlightenment


revolution






Inspired by: A Crash in Computing.

Mon, Jan 14, 2008  Permanent link

This So-Called Unnatural Nature, Ourselves

All you have to do to resolve the enhancement debate in your mind is watch these fantastic epiphanies by Richard and Megan. Computers enhance our memory and help us do just about everything we want to do just about every day we want to do it. But the buck doesn’t stop there…

Phones project our voices over longer distances than our vocal cords; iPods store our friends’ phone numbers while helping our eardrums jingle in pleasurable ways. My glasses help me see the world; my father has gone a step further and gotten laser eye surgery. Surgeons use robotic hands to save lives with the least possible amount of bodily trauma; rovers go where we can’t or don’t want to go.

Athletes use performance-enhancing drugs while critics sit in the bleachers watching the action through binoculars. We enhance our abilities every time we light a stove, drive a car, lace up our shoes or wrap ourselves in a blanket.

“Trans”human? If we’re going to use that troublesome word, then we have to admit: we’re already there folks...and it is natural. If “natural” is to be understood as what grows on trees and falls from the sky, then there is already almost nothing natural about the way we live. If the word is to mean the progression of evolution, then there is everything natural about our lives.

The truth is, we enhanced our bodies - and subsequently our minds - the moment one of our ancestors picked up a stick and used it for any purpose. Is to be “natural” to be pre-invention? Pre-ingenuity? Pre-creativity? With our minds a product of the evolution of matter, our various technologies are the continuations of a trajectory that began at the birth of the universe.

Fri, Jan 11, 2008  Permanent link

on the first night...

Wed, Nov 7, 2007  Permanent link

Head, Shoulders, Knees and Mind

There's been a lot of discussion on the mind/body relationship. Below are my newest thoughts and a few quotes from fellow space collectors.

Al:

Superfamous:

Human activity has drastically changed over a relatively short period of time, causing much of the current shape of our bodies to be inconveniently outdated.

Megan:

...the human body isn't going anywhere. those nearly drug-induced states that flood your person on ocassion, those are compliments of the complex interaction between body and mind...

Xárene:

I am resolved that the body is enslaved by the mind in order to advance its purposes. [...] Does the mind need a physical connection to the environment it occupies? Will it always need a body?

How about a discussion project to help make up our minds/bodies on the subject?

Sun, Jul 15, 2007  Permanent link

New Recycle Symbol

Correcting the implied perpetuality of the traditional recycle symbol:

According to the laws of thermodynamics, the energy and matter put into an open system cannot yield equal amounts of energy and matter since a large quantity of it is lost through heat transfer to its surrounding or containing systems. The amount of energy and matter needed to create one aluminum can in the open system of a recycling plant is not equal to the energy and matter held in one aluminum can - additional effort is required to account for the loss of energy into the containing system of the universe through friction and various inefficiencies of the recycling plant.

Thus, with the entire symbol representing the open system of recycling, the new symbol represents the loss of energy into the containing system.

Waste, it seems, is inevitable on our human scale.

Mon, Jun 11, 2007  Permanent link

Past, Present, Future #1

Tue, Jun 5, 2007  Permanent link

All I Can Be Certain Of

Is it possible to discuss anything without discussing something else? We talk about wars in comparison to previous ones, genocides in comparison to similar ones. We talk about art in terms of what came before, music in relation to its time. We apply various theories to all of the above and relate world news events to personal events. Dogs look excited and cats look indifferent just like humans. In the act of expression, we compare external forces and objects to the words we use to describe them - we get "caught red-handed."

We even, from time to time, like to compare the universe to a watch.

And yet in the back of our minds, we know that doesn’t quite work. Unlike a watch, the universe seems to have come from nothing.

Perhaps that’s the hitch with understanding the universe: The one thing we cannot seem to understand – in terms of anything (theories, patterns or anything else) - is nothing.

* * *

The more I think about it, the more it seems that the only thing that is necessarily true is the difference between 0 and 1. Nothing and something. Being and not. Other than that, anything we talk about can only be discussed in terms of ourselves and our constructs.

Fri, May 18, 2007  Permanent link

space col·lect [spās kä-lekt]: a project proposal

After the discussion regarding infinity, my views on the matter had started to change. So I let these new ideas ruminate in my mind for a few days, and then decided to do some reading.

I began with the dictionary. I looked up "universe" on Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary...nothing too compelling. Next I looked up "space" and was somewhat interested to find that the definition for the word as referring to outer space was only the fifth definition listed. I decided to investigate further by referencing another dictionary - in doing so I happened upon a startling find.

The dictionary I used is one we've had in our house for years, and one my family has always used most conclusively. The volume is missing all its cover and introductory pages, so that the "cover" is the first page of the letter "A" - by the looks of it, it is a rather old edition. For the most part, its definitions for "space" were quite similar to Merriam-Webster's Online definitions - starting with similar definitions for the word in terms of time, space as defined by three or more points, a musical staff, etc. with the definition referring to "outer space" being the fourth entry instead of Merriam-Webster's fifth. However, compare the difference in defintions:

Merriam-Webster's:
5 : the region beyond the earth's atmosphere or beyond the solar system

our family dictionary:
4 : the region currently beyond human thought - constantly in flux as defintion depends on current state of humanity

Stunned, I hunted for the word in as many dictionaries as I could get my hands on. But to no avail. None had entries remotely as mysterious. I was baffled.

Deep in though, I decided it must be some sort of prank - an alteration made during the last step of printing by a linguistic trickster. But who was this person? And what dictionary did I hold in my hands in the first place? With it's cover pages long lost, there was no way to tell. This dictionary that I had blindly trusted for so long.

And yet...the defintion seemed so truthful. Somehow so much more complete than "the region beyond the earth's atmosphere or beyond the solar system." After days of thought, I came up with an answer to my questions.

My anomalous and inexplicable dictionary with its equally anomalous trickster author had in an instant shattered years of faith. Faith in the authority of this book called "dictionary." Faith in the authority of objectivity. My linguistic trickster had revealed to me the subjectivity of one of our most base methods of understanding our world - language. The answer to my questions was that none of them mattered. It didn't matter who the prankster was, and what dictionary I held in my hands. It, like any other diciontary, was no more or less authoritative than any other dictionary or book or thought.

Words change meaning and mean differently for everyone. Why allow a group of people to define them definitively? For example, Merriam-Webster's four definitions for "oil" do not feel complete in today's world. A possible new, fifth definition to be included:

oil
noun
[...]
5 : a soon to be outdated fuel source

So, a project proposal:
We hear often of people trying to get words into the established dictionaries. There is a long set of criteria a word must pass before it is included - this seems like the wrong way of going about it. Let's pull the rug out from under language.

Let's create our own dictionary. New words and new understandings of old words. Let's compile as many as we can as thoroughly as we can. Once we have enough, we'll get it published and put on the reference shelves of bookstores as well as on our own official, ever-updated online dictionary. Anyone can contribute as frequently as they like. We'll discuss each word and definition(s) proposed and then make it "official."

Suggestions for words to re-define:

oil, zero, one, is

And a group of new words:

space-col·lect
verb
1. to engage in post-ideological, non-partisan, forward thinking activities or discussions: He tried to space-collect his way out of the mindless political argument.
2. to publish an entry on the Space Collective website: Did you space-collect today?
space-collected — space-collecting

space-col·lec·tion
noun
1. a published entry on a Space Collective website page: I loved your space-collection on generative art.
2. a post-ideological, non-partisan, forward thinking act or statement: Her space-collection changed everyone's mind.

space-col·lec·tor
noun
one who engages in space-collecting

space-col·lect·ed
adj
displaying post-ideological, non-partisan, forward thinking properties: That is so space-collected.

Here's to the spirit of our trickster linguist.

Takers?

Tue, May 15, 2007  Permanent link