----------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...@voyd.com
<mailto:p...@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-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
<mailto:empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
<empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
<mailto:empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>> On Behalf Of
warkk
Sent: Monday, June 25, 2018 4:13 PM
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
<mailto:empyre@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, <dolly...@thing.net
<mailto:dolly...@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@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
<mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
> > http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
<http://empyre.library.cornell.edu>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
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> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
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>
--
McKenzie Wark
*Professor of Media and Culture*
EUGENE LANG COLLEGE
65 w11th st, NEW YORK, NY 10011
wa...@newschool.edu <mailto:wa...@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@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
<mailto:empyre@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
wa...@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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