Re: [-empyre-] Fwd: Re: Introducing Lynne DeSilva-Johnson!
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I meant to send this link to Lynne! But sharing again here, Bjork's all full of love, and robots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjI2J2SQ528 Thanks again, and really look forward to the next forum on fake news, a pressing topic of our current times. On 2017-06-05 08:36, Margaret J Rhee wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I was just about to place a last response, and suddenly realized Lynne's generative message below may not have gone out to the listserve. Perhaps as a last note, it would be wonderful to engage with Lynne's words here. "in a way, robot poetics may now be in our nature, so that all of us are inadvertantly engaged in it at all times, some more consciously than others." Perhaps this speaks to the cybernectics of empyre, and our continuing dialogue on robot poetics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjI2J2SQ528 warmly, Margaret Original Message Subject: Re: Introducing Lynne DeSilva-Johnson! Date: 2017-05-30 15:46 From: the operating system To: Margaret J Rhee Glad for this further engagement, and honored to be held in Cyborg ears at Wiscon! Somehow knew many folks there this year. I want to rejoin your comments here, but also re-engage with some of the questions that started off the month, just to bring things full circle -- because I think they help me weave the ontological threads I'm going for: "_What is a poem? Is it a thought, or a dream? / __Our bodies, maybe?_ _Now, what is a machine?"_ I start here because I want to speak to the organism-as-machine, the algorithm-as-ecology, and technology as an evolving, pre-mechanized condition, which perhaps moved away from "nature" in our common lexicon, but never entirely in fact -- and that, too, in a way, robot poetics may now be in our nature, so that all of us are inadvertantly engaged in it at all times, some more consciously than others. One of the most impactful lectures I sat in as a student was in a 4-fields required intro-anthro class, in Archeology. And in that lecture -- on "technology," the professor opened with a slide on early nets -- literal nets, for fishing -- and how they transformed all that came after. The conceptual shift that moved "technology" away from modern machines to its root as the marriage of techne and logia. I say this because The OS is entirely built on an iterative, ecological, machine learning / agile, open source inspired model -- and because I see myself quite literally at the helm of an organism, which is really just a segment of breathing, evolving cyborg mycelia to which both humans and code -- and, as such, the tools of our hyper-networked life (like mobile devices) are intimately tied. I'm sort of an early adopter nerd, you know -- I had a blog starting in 2003, was doing poetry and art on products on cafepress about that time and I run in these sort of futurist circles -- I'm as likely to be reading Rheingold or WIRED as I am poetry -- and so when I think about the OS I think about how this organism MUST be built using the materials of this time, and how _we_ are co-evolving in physical landscape and rewriting our own genetics via the specific techne and logia of this time. I believe this deeply. So, that means -- I am thinking about SEO and languaging for social networks, and metatagging, in my own art and poetics as well as in the work I produce for the OS on and offline -- and I'm also looking for sensibilities that marry those languages. I think often this manifests in popular poetics as inclusions of meme or pop reference -- and I think there's a place for that -- but my own scanner, looking at manuscripts and work, is always seeking out voices that dialogue with the myriad codes we are required to parse and codeswitch seamlessly in order to not only function but especially to thrive here. I think a lot of the work that I select for The OS catalog engages with a post-colonial, anthropocene intersectionality that dives just as deeply into ecopoetic concerns -- and all of this with an awareness of the hyper-written linguistic simulacra of our engagements here. Mark Gurarie's book, _Everybody's Automat_, as you say here, Margaret, is a great example of this, as is Judith Goldman's [18]_agon [18]_ -- yet none of these authors are overtly engaged with the titular work of "robot poetics" -- which I think is important to consider. When given an offer of this language, and versed in its questions, many of our authors -- and myself -- would certainly consider ourselves to be working there, but it's never been language that was used. Part of this may simply be what part of academic life (or entirely non-academic life) folks find themselves in. So much of the labelling (or lack thereof) has to do with circles and association. I've been thinking a lot about Paolo Soleri, whose work I return to cyclically, and I'm currently writing a short pamphlet drawi
[-empyre-] Fwd: Re: Introducing Lynne DeSilva-Johnson!
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I was just about to place a last response, and suddenly realized Lynne's generative message below may not have gone out to the listserve. Perhaps as a last note, it would be wonderful to engage with Lynne's words here. "in a way, robot poetics may now be in our nature, so that all of us are inadvertantly engaged in it at all times, some more consciously than others." Perhaps this speaks to the cybernectics of empyre, and our continuing dialogue on robot poetics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjI2J2SQ528 warmly, Margaret Original Message Subject: Re: Introducing Lynne DeSilva-Johnson! Date: 2017-05-30 15:46 From: the operating system To: Margaret J Rhee Glad for this further engagement, and honored to be held in Cyborg ears at Wiscon! Somehow knew many folks there this year. I want to rejoin your comments here, but also re-engage with some of the questions that started off the month, just to bring things full circle -- because I think they help me weave the ontological threads I'm going for: "_What is a poem? Is it a thought, or a dream? / __Our bodies, maybe?_ _Now, what is a machine?"_ I start here because I want to speak to the organism-as-machine, the algorithm-as-ecology, and technology as an evolving, pre-mechanized condition, which perhaps moved away from "nature" in our common lexicon, but never entirely in fact -- and that, too, in a way, robot poetics may now be in our nature, so that all of us are inadvertantly engaged in it at all times, some more consciously than others. One of the most impactful lectures I sat in as a student was in a 4-fields required intro-anthro class, in Archeology. And in that lecture -- on "technology," the professor opened with a slide on early nets -- literal nets, for fishing -- and how they transformed all that came after. The conceptual shift that moved "technology" away from modern machines to its root as the marriage of techne and logia. I say this because The OS is entirely built on an iterative, ecological, machine learning / agile, open source inspired model -- and because I see myself quite literally at the helm of an organism, which is really just a segment of breathing, evolving cyborg mycelia to which both humans and code -- and, as such, the tools of our hyper-networked life (like mobile devices) are intimately tied. I'm sort of an early adopter nerd, you know -- I had a blog starting in 2003, was doing poetry and art on products on cafepress about that time and I run in these sort of futurist circles -- I'm as likely to be reading Rheingold or WIRED as I am poetry -- and so when I think about the OS I think about how this organism MUST be built using the materials of this time, and how _we_ are co-evolving in physical landscape and rewriting our own genetics via the specific techne and logia of this time. I believe this deeply. So, that means -- I am thinking about SEO and languaging for social networks, and metatagging, in my own art and poetics as well as in the work I produce for the OS on and offline -- and I'm also looking for sensibilities that marry those languages. I think often this manifests in popular poetics as inclusions of meme or pop reference -- and I think there's a place for that -- but my own scanner, looking at manuscripts and work, is always seeking out voices that dialogue with the myriad codes we are required to parse and codeswitch seamlessly in order to not only function but especially to thrive here. I think a lot of the work that I select for The OS catalog engages with a post-colonial, anthropocene intersectionality that dives just as deeply into ecopoetic concerns -- and all of this with an awareness of the hyper-written linguistic simulacra of our engagements here. Mark Gurarie's book, _Everybody's Automat_, as you say here, Margaret, is a great example of this, as is Judith Goldman's [18]_agon [18]_ -- yet none of these authors are overtly engaged with the titular work of "robot poetics" -- which I think is important to consider. When given an offer of this language, and versed in its questions, many of our authors -- and myself -- would certainly consider ourselves to be working there, but it's never been language that was used. Part of this may simply be what part of academic life (or entirely non-academic life) folks find themselves in. So much of the labelling (or lack thereof) has to do with circles and association. I've been thinking a lot about Paolo Soleri, whose work I return to cyclically, and I'm currently writing a short pamphlet drawing on some of his ideas (for Amanda Ngoho Reavey's Panthalassa Pamphlet series, speaking of which) - he writes in _The Bridge Between Matter & Spirit is Matter Becoming Spirit _about Esthetogenesis [19], a process of self-revelation that becomes possible via evolution -- something he envisioned as being irrevocably connected to how we as humans construct our environment. As
