Hi Johannes, Your reply is very interesting, much appreciated. I was trying to echo some of the factors you referred to in Alan's post, but I often try to reference Calvino for clarity which I forget is only clarifying to people with an interest in Calvino. 🙂
Theater is such a great tradition, practice, literature, and metaphor. I was trying to relate Godel's theorem to Alan's mention of rules, math, structures, sets and categories, and the quote (from whom?) "no end to it, and no end to his thinking." All of these to me compared very closely to Hofstadter's idea of "The Eternal Golden Braid." In this sense I think that theater is also eternal, but eternally incomplete. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, as described by Hofstadter, says that "any system which is 'sufficiently powerful' is, by virtue of its power, incomplete, in the sense that there are well-formed strings which express true statements of number theory, but which are not theorems. There are truths belonging to number theory which are not provable within the system." It's a confusing idea I am just starting to study, but Hofstadter's discussion of it mentions language as a characteristic of mind, whereas axiomatic logic and certainty are more characteristic of machine. To me it suggests that not all truths can be proven, and some can only be "enacted" so to speak; which Alan's post also reminded me of. I cannot say if Hofstadter is on track or off, only that I find GEB interesting, and of course with the caveat that I may be misreading it. Here is the final page of Six Memos, which your comments reminded me of and which may have been the last words Calvino ever wrote. Where is theater now? The answer may be "everywhere," even these emails being a snippet of dialogue in the expanded space. “I have come to the end of this apologia for the novel as a vast net. Someone might object that the more the work tends toward the multiplication of possibilities, the further it departs from that unicum which is the self of the writer, his inner sincerity and the discovery of his own truth. But I would answer: Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? “But perhaps the answer that stands closest to my heart is something else: Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic…. Was this not perhaps what Ovid was aiming at, when he wrote about the continuity of forms? And what Lucretius was aiming at when he identified himself with that nature common to each and every thing?” (“Multiplicity,” p. 124) ________________________________ From: NetBehaviour <[email protected]> on behalf of Johannes Birringer <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, April 27, 2020 1:54 PM To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Confusion Entanglement, philosophy, poetics hello all: the postings on this list, very often, amaze me, and I can't put my finger on it. is this a writer's room of networked self-isolated artists, makers, solitudinists, thinkers? thanks Alan for your text and image, the latter shot as you seem to imply, "entre chien et loup" (as French filmmakers call that blurry threshold time, between hope and fear, between the familiar and comfortable, the unknown and dangerous), stimulating Max's response which is about something quite different, his Solstizio Calvino. The a-facticity of your writing, Alan, is wonderful and allusive to probably a old hebrew / biblical notion of where the word began or where things began begetting rules or Verbote. Theatre currently is verboten. Does anyone know the Segal Theatre Center ? I think its in New York City, and today and every day at 12 noon (EDT) there are talks. Today's was with Rimini Protokoll - a company that produces documentary theatre pieces, radio shows and work in the urban environment in a diverse variety of collaborative partnerships.... I thought, given how we may have more time to read or listen, being self-isolated and not mingling in urban environments (our town hall here today sent messengers around the little town, to each house, distributing free masks!), what would it be like, after theatre in black boxes, following Alan's references, to listen more to sound resonating through the wide canyons, just as light itself, scintillated and reflected from a myriad of surfaces, rough and smooth, at all angles and colorations. as we go deeper, into a not yet known, inconceivable world of sound and light.... regards Johannes Birringer ps. To watch the HowlRound Live Stream, click here: https://howlround.com/happenings/livestreaming-segal-talks-rimini-protokoll-daniel-wetzel-helgard-haug-and-stefan-kaegi To watch the Segal Facebook Live Stream: https://www.facebook.com/events/216616263120779/ To watch previous talks on the Segal YouTube Channel, click here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7hiSnB3RRtJuyNbhfMwDdg ________________________________________ From: NetBehaviour <[email protected]> on behalf of Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour <[email protected]> Sent: 27 April 2020 19:04 Hi, the image was taken in the evening in downtown Providence, a block from us, twilight lighting. I wanted to create an almost afterimage, something not quite there, in relation to the text and the difference between protocol sentences and the inert real, which of course is absent from the image. This ties into the issues of facticity the text discusses. Best, and thank you!, Alan On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 1:50 PM Max Herman via NetBehaviour <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi Alan, I like this image -- though it is surprisingly frustrating to look at, as if I'm losing my sight, visual tinnitus? -- and the ideas in the text. This past week I've been reading Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, chapter 4, titled "Consistency, Completeness, and Geometry" and it has also been confusing. He discusses Godel's incompleteness theorem, Bach's unfinished "The Art of The Fugue" and his "Little Harmonic Labyrinth," layers of stability in visual perception, and explicit vs. implicit meaning, also including an old-time print of a labyrinth. A lot of content for one chapter! [...] _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
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