Re: nettime subjective math.
Hello Mark, Thanks for your suggestions. I read the last chapter of Boole's Laws of Thought, Constitution of the Intellect and it was very worthwhile in ways that are beyond words. It also provides a next step for interpretation in connecting logic with ordering, which is essential, if not how ungrounded reasoning may relate to chaos. My particular problem is with reading itself, for it is easy to consider ideas, yet to get to the ideas can take lots of effort which is the inherent inefficiency. For this reason I much prefer communicating with people about the ideas (living ideas) versus in books, in their archived versions. Reading books or long texts on a computer screen must be a form of monastic punishment, I figure. It is likely strange that an adequate e-reader for such media is non-existent for 'ideas' beyond Penguin classics format. Meaning large format front-lit e-ink display for PDF texts. I have read Understanding Media and another text-image work (on hot and cool media) by Marshall McLuhan, yet never made it into the Gutenberg Galaxy or another work about the alphabet. Recently some tarot or cards were seen online of his and the metaphysics seemed wobbly so it made me uneasy about further investigation. Yet the ideas are of interest, it is just getting through texts which is tremendously challenging given the format. Thus it would be wonderful to communicate about the Trivium and if I find a workable way to approach it and can access the ideas, then will go that route, though it would be much preferred to communicate about the ideas themselves firstly and I hope that future exists. My faith in books has been lessened a great deal by issues of logic and I have found it difficult to read the book as a format, except perhaps for sampling text due to the conflicted context in which ideas reside. This could be true of all reading and writing yet for books it could involve a higher degree of challenge to access what is communicated in some instances. Perhaps this is heretical in terms of scholarship yet I am more a talker/debater/thinker, into discussing ideas, direct communications, writing not the ideal. To give a sense of the difference perhaps in vantage, today it seems a text is given some stature as if it is watching a movie, as per McLuhan if not inverted. For instance, if a book was presented on a projector screen to an audience in a room and automatically placed on a slow scroll setting via remote control, people could 'collectively read' or group read the text, and in a sense this is what occurs in English classes in gradeschool highschool and college, in that there is an assignment that most read and then discuss. And so this would be the passing of time, what is read, and yet in real-time in this example. Given enough reverence, a certain interpretation could become fixed about a text, ideological even, about answered questions in a particular viewpoint or framework, such that the book is an interface for the ideas it contains and can be accessed/utilized. Harnessing the book, its content, as a mechanism. Yet what if some of this was ungrounded, an issue of enculturation by being partly ungrounded- such that it is about formation of beliefs, indoctrination. With the important detail that it could be false or propagate other problems through such a view. So perhaps in this way, an accepted reading could eventually function as if a movie, the text scrolling by and the group reading along, and while there may be dissection of the ideas and understanding of the symbolism, more could be at work in the interaction that is being interfaced. Special effects may not be noticed, unconscious behavioral influences, perhaps a type of compact between reader and writer, an exchange that is not fully accounted for, which to access the ideas also means accessing its larger mechanism, the dynamics that allow it to function within society. In English class this book could be broken down then into its concepts even, and like a movie plot passing by at a heightened perceptual pace, it is just enough to keep up with it, to stay abreast of the story, to allow the plot to continue at this pace. If someone in the audience suddenly shouted out the word 'false!' at some statement, the scrolling of the text would stop and call into question the plot. And many times these moments create other books that reference divergences or counterpoints to the POVs of various viewpoints and textual perspectives. In that there is a forking of interpretation that exists, in the universe of books, as books reference one another yet also are generated by disagreements along lines of fracture, where assumptions are no longer shared. And so a new view fills everyone in to another potential interpretation in a given context. So perhaps philosophy fits this model more than others because of schools of thought and additive or
Re: nettime subjective math.
Brian: Your ruminations about the problems with the book are very important. Most of human history has been conducted through discussions and conflicts that cannot be put into books. A culture that is locked into books is a very ODD one indeed. This is the topic of McLuhan's !962 Gutenberg Galaxy, which you skipped but might now enjoy. The West, under the environmental dominance of books, has been a very strange place indeed. McLuhan's interest in ELECTRIC technology -- telegraph, telephone, radio, motion pictures, etc. -- was precisely because this new technological environment *undermined* the effects of the BOOK. The *book* that has, of course, had the greatest effect (as a book) on our culture is the last book of the Bible, the Revelations of St. John (otherwise known as the Apocalypse.) Speculations about the END OF THE WORLD (and the underlying conviction that the world we have *must* come to an end because it is so terrible and so evil) are the basis of much of the modern Western world for the past 400 years. And, it is the basis of most political radicalism, as expressed on nettime and elsewhere. None of this end-of-the-world thinking would be possible with the book. Communism is, afterall, just another version of the Millennium (after the Armageddon of class warfare) as promised by John. And, it's the same BOOK-based utopian thinking that gave us modern Capitalism. Two sides of the same coin. Like the TWO PARTY political system. LEFT and RIGHT. Often things that appear to be opposites are really the same because they are built on the same premises. Even though they may be vehemently opposed and prepared to fight with great passion, they are really just the YIN and the YANG of the same underlying and agreed upon beliefs. You can think of this as the universe balancing things out. In Gestalt psychological terms, these are two major figures that share a common ground. Two sides of the same coin -- hard to see them both at once and yet you know that heads and tails couldn't exist one without the other. If you haven't read it, then Western civilization over the past 400 years won't make much sense without Revelations. And, maybe even if you have, it still doesn't. When the NYTimes ran its lead story on the Royal Society of London in last week's Science Times, A Redoubt of Learning Holds Firm: The Royal Society, crucible of the scientific revolution that formed the modern world, strives to stay relevant, they went out of their way to note that: Newton, Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle and many more came together in a spirit of revolutionary if at times eccentric inquiry. Magic and alchemy greatly fascinated the society's founders . . . During that intoxicating century, nearly everything holy, from royal rank to economics to science to the immortality of the soul, was challenged . . . Though rationalists, these scientists viewed God as central to their universe and their work. As Edward Dolnick, author of 'The Clockwork Universe' [the image picked by the Times to fill the page above the story is of clockwork-like telescope gearing] , an entertaining history of the early society [if you'd like to read an even more entertaining history, go to Neal Stephenson's 'The System of the World,' the final piece of his three-part Baroque Cycle], noted, the founders viewed the laws of nature and of God as inseparable. They were mapping this universe . . . And there was that question of magic. Society members lived in a time shadowed by apocalyptic dread, from plague to fire to war. They were fascinated by alchemy, unicorns' horns and magic salves, and they often experimented on themselves. _http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/science/royal-society-holds-firm-amid-pol itical-challenges-to-science.html?_r=1pagewanted=all_ (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/science/royal-society-holds-firm-amid-political-challenges-to- science.html?_r=1pagewanted=all) Our own times (driven as it is by today's Tea Party libertarians who are the flipside of the same individualist coin as the Occupy Wall Streeters), are likewise shadowed by the revolutionary upheavals of the 1960s. How different is this from the 1660s? We are still experimenting on ourselves. LSD is (personal) alchemy and a magic salve. Global warming is the plague and the fire. Vietnam was the war. But, now we have CYBERTERRORISM (driven the new yellow peril who can't be creative so they must steal our intellectual property)!! History is funny that way. Even if you *do* understand it, you are likely doomed to repeat it. g Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY In a message dated 9/9/2012 5:58:15 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, nulltang...@gmail.com writes: Hello Mark, Thanks for your suggestions. I read the last chapter of Boole's Laws of Thought, Constitution of the Intellect and it was very worthwhile in
Re: nettime subjective math.
Michael H Goldhaber wrote: How does your approach relate to or differ from Lotfi Zadeh's fuzzy logic? Hello Michael, thanks for your interesting question. I had not heard of Lotfi Zadeh because my path into logic was through individual explorations with the alphabet as a phase-changing system, experimenting with letters and numbers, their reflections and rotations of shared structure. This was verified by a university math teacher to be a form of calculus, who recommended a course on 'probability' which closely relates set theory and venn diagrams in what may be considered a 'weighted analysis' of sorts. This is the form of mathematics that should be taught in early and all education because it is of practical value for basic reasoning, in terms of its allowing for robust evaluation and understanding of involved ramifications. It allows someone to reason something is 'probable' in a way that tends towards absolute truth in reasoning, and this is different than saying it is likely or possible. So there is deep empirical grounding it can reference if ideas are mediated in terms of their truth and logic. Going into this course I think the concept was already existent of 'superposition' in terms of the alphanumeric sign (HIOX) which is replicated in a 16-segment LED display, essentially a union jack symbol that generates all western letters and numbers. Further, for numbers, the 7-segment display, an LED component used in electric clock radios and equipment for readout, is a simpler example of the superposition concept... (note: I did not know the physics word 'superposition' yet had some sense of the concept because of this...) The 7-segment LED looks like a letter '8' that is more rectilinear and box-like. Within this symbol, all of the numbers - 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - can be regenerated. So in a sense they are suspended within this '8' that is not actually an '8' when it is not lit-up, only outline or matrix for a potential 8 or 1 or 3, etc. So there is a potential number, 0 through 9, that can be displayed. Also hexadecimal letters (A B C D E F) can generate from the symbol, so there is an alphanumeric aspect. In this way, without calling it 'superposition' this same potentiality was noticed in these cultural symbols, the 16-segment or HIOX symbol (which is called that because it equates to the overlaying of those letters) often is seen in building details from ancient times, yet also in federal buildings worldwide, in addition to use in electronics as alphanumeric display components. For the 16-segment, the entire alphabet and number system can be recreated from a single symbol, so in this way its potentiality is 26 letters and 10 numbers though it can go beyond that given extended signs. Investigating the structural relations between letters and numbers, especially after reading The Republic by Plato where this activity was directly referenced, became a major question and cultural enigma: why is this not being discussed, why is there no record of such an amazing ordering device, if not 'parti' (which a professor described as being 'organizational logic'). Especially its code-like or mastercode-like attributes in civilization. Plato had described part of it in Meno yet only a part of the symbol related to its geometry. I did not know what to call any of this until taking the course in probabilities and then it became possible to begin conceptualizing the condition it exists within in terms of exponential counting, or relationships, if it can accurately be described this way. The enigma of superposition can be presented as a riddle and this is easily demonstrated by these generative symbols. For example, a 7-segment display could be used to animate a sequence of the letter E and number 3 in a spinning condition, around a central axis, which then would appear as a number '8' (if not letter B) on the electronic display or even via a physical motor with a single alphanumeric shape, a number 3 on oneside and a letter E on the other, set spinning. If observing this spinning shape, knowing it may be either a letter E or number 3, yet because of its motion it is indistinguishable and merged into one entity, essentially -both- letter -and- number, then its potentiality may be hard to determine precisely at a given observation, is it a number 3 or letter E? What if it is somewhere between, what does that mean - in that a gradient could potentially exist. This is essentially the limit of binary reasoning, a boundary condition for observation. Depending on how fast it is spinning, the blurring that occurs could either constitute its own entity, such that it is only possible to see in terms of its being '8', which is outside the question (3|E), because it is precisely not just one or the other choice. So the transformative condition in which the objects exist cannot be evaluated in the binary terms, as if they
Re: nettime subjective math .
Hi Brian, I feel the same way as you about t the democracy in France, where I'm living, and any other democratic country today, as far I know them. My proposal was not for them, it was an abstract thinking, and the yes/no/neither case was just one case among others you can imagine. Of course, a deep thinking about blank vote and abstention is required to give them their right meaning, and I may give you mine once if you want, but it was out of the scope. I submit this proportional voting idea to your judgement as your paradoxic logic make me think about it. In fact, I thought the yes/no/neither as the minimal case, but it is not as blank and abstention do not have the same meaning, I think that the real minimal case is 'yes/no/blank/abstention. By the way, the sample page is really heavy, as I do the minimal work to make it work... the picture is really heavy as it is an PHP generated HTML table and the page make take a long time to load. Maybe you were not patient enough to load the whole page and see the example working. May you try again ? http://brokenclock.free.fr/scripts/pev/pev-0.0.1.php It works well with FF 15, IE 9, Chrome. Regards, St??phane Mourey 2012/9/7 brian carroll nulltang...@gmail.com Hello St??phane The point is : To increase freedom, I thought about a system that allow me to share my voice between the different possibilities in the proportion I want. I visited your project page and while I could not get the javascript example to function the basic idea is there and it is quite interesting to consider in terms of voting. -- Blog: Impossible Exil http://impossible-exil.info/ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Debt As A Public Good, Berlin #BeautifulTrouble Book Launch w/ @AndrewBoyd @Info_Activism // Attn @BTroublemakers
This Thursday, Andrew Boyd{1} will be in town for the Berlin launch of
Beautiful Trouble{2}, something of an An encyclopedia for creative
activism as described by Sandra Cuff, of the Vancouver Media Co-op. As
a contributor, I will join Andrew for the launch. Please come and join
us.
My contributions to the book where on the subject of organizing around
debt as a political focus. Beyond the two essays in the book, I have
written quite a bit about this already{3}. The event on Thursday is a
book launch, not a lecture, so I'll talk for 15 minutes or so, since
tactics are an important focus in the book, and Andrew will certainly
cover some of them, I want to try to go a little more theoretical and
attempt an macroeconomics of debt in 15 minutes. We'll see how it goes.
Here's a bit of primer.
If a modern monetary economy is to have either growth or savings it
requires a deficit somewhere.
This is not an opinion, or an ideologically biased point of view. It is
an arithmetic fact based on the what money means in actually existing
modern economies.
The key identities here are the Sectoral Balances. The sectors are
private, public, and international. And the three balances in question
are net private savings, the total amount the private sector, including
households, can save, along with the public balance, that is the amount
the Government taxes minus what it spends, and the current account
balance, which the balance between imports and exports.
If you sum these three balances the total is always zero. That is
because there is only a limited amount of money in the economy at any
time, and therefore any surplus in one balance must inevitably show up
as a deficit in another.
If economy needs more money, either because it is growing, or because
people or corporations want or need to save more, either the budget
deficit needs to increase or the trade imports need to go down relative
to exports. If neither of these things happen, then neither economic
growth, nor increased saving is possible. This is why if wealth is to
grow, either a government deficit or trade surplus is required. Of
course, the world as a whole can not have a trade surplus. A trade
surplus in any nation, must be offset by a trade deficit in another.
Thus, within a modern monetary economy, the only means for an wealth to
grow in a balanced trade environment is for the Government to run a
budgetary deficit.
In other words, if the private sector is carrying too much debt, this
means the public sector is likely taxing too much or spending too
little. Government needs to increase it's deficit.
Government spending, and also government borrowing is essential for the
functioning of our economy. Back in the year 2000, when the economy was
on over-drive and the US Federal Reserve bank was ratcheting interest
rates in an attempt to cool down an economy it felt was in overdrive,
Scott F. Grannis, Chief Economist of a US asset management firm,
delivered a remarkable paper at the Cato Institute 18th Annual Monetary
Conference, a right-wing affair co-sponsored by the Economist. Grannis,
like other fund managers was terrified. What terrified him was that the
combination of a government budgetary surplus and the fed's tight
monetary policy would result in a scarcity of government treasuries.
It's worth quoting him.
Grannis argues The world needs Treasuries, and would be worse off
without them. They are a public good just like our justice system, our
national defense, and our network of interstate highways. [...] We
would be foolish to pay down the national debt. Although Grannis
interest are ultimately self-serving, the preservation of a risk-free
investment, his point holds true. Bill Mitchell reports a similar
situation taking place on Australia, during a period of budgetary
surplus the government wanted to pay down it's debt, and the financial
industry went ballistic, for fear of a scarcity of risk-free Treasuries
to hold in their portfolios.
Money, like Treasuries, is simply a form of Public debt. The fact is
that Public debt, no matter if it's in the form of accounts, currency or
treasuries, is the basis of the modern monetary economy. We'd all be
broke without it. Money enters the economy as government spending, and
exits the economy as tax payments. If the government has a balanced
budget, no extra money remains in circulation, and there can be no
increase in private savings. If the Government has a budgetary surplus,
this means that private wealth is decreased.
For this reason, as Grannis says, Debt is a Public Good, in the same
way the infrastructure such as roads create the capacity for transport,
government debt creates the capacity for commerce. Fiscal policy should
never be interpreted from the budgetary balance alone, but must always
keep the Sectoral Balances in mind. The government must spend enough to
ensure that scarcity of its's debt does not strangle the
Re: nettime Debt As A Public Good, Berlin #BeautifulTrouble Book Launch w/ @AndrewBoyd @Info_Activism // Attn @BTroublemakers
Hi Dmytri. I agree with: Organizing around debt means uniting against insane policies that promote the interests of rich corporations and rich countries against common households and poorer countries. Much of the debt born my households and the debt born by peripheral nations is a result of bad government and bad economic policy. But I don't understand why you stick with this Keynesian analysis which, if it ever applied anywhere, partly illuminated the national economies of Europe during *les trente glorieuses* of social democracy. The approach doesn't offer much insight into the current global system of money where most of it goes off the books. Do you advocate a return to national economy? There must be some rhetorical purpose for exhuming this relic. Best, Keith PS Andrew Boyd does look like he is fun. Good luck with the meeting. On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 8:14 PM, Dmytri Kleiner d...@telekommunisten.netwrote: Here's a bit of primer. If a modern monetary economy is to have either growth or savings it requires a deficit somewhere. This is not an opinion, or an ideologically biased point of view. It is an arithmetic fact based on the what money means in actually existing modern economies. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Artforum Bishop Digital Divide: Whatever happened to digital art?
http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201207id=31944 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DIGITAL ART? Cast your mind back to the late 1990s, when we got our first e-mail accounts. Wasn't there a pervasive sense that visual art was going to get digital, too, harnessing the new technologies that were just beginning to transform our lives? But somehow the venture never really gained traction -- which is not to say that digital media have failed to infiltrate contemporary art. Most art today deploys new technology at one if not most stages of its production, dissemination, and consumption. Multichannel video installations, Photoshopped images, digital prints, cut-and-pasted files (nowhere better exemplified than in Christian Marclay's The Clock, 2010): These are ubiquitous forms, their omnipresence facilitated by the accessibility and affordability of digital cameras and editing software. There are plenty of examples of art that makes use of Second Life (Cao Fei), computer-game graphics (Miltos Manetas), YouTube clips (Cory Arcangel), iPhone apps (Amy Sillman), etc.[1] So why do I have a sense that the appearance and content of contemporary art have been curiously unresponsive to the total upheaval in our labor and leisure inaugurated by the digital revolution? While many artists use digital technology, how many really confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital? How many thematize this, or reflect deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence? I find it strange that I can count on one hand the works of art that do seem to undertake this task: the flirtations between Frances Stark and various Italian cyberlovers in her video My Best Thing, 2011; Thomas Hirschhorn's video of a finger idly scrolling through gruesome images of blown-apart bodies on a touch screen, occasionally pausing to enlarge, zoom in, move on (Touching Reality, 2012); the frenetic, garbled scripts of Ryan Trecartin's videos (such as K-Corea INC.K [Section A], 2009). Each suggests the endlessly disposable, rapidly mutable ephemera of the virtual age and its impact on our consumption of relationships, images, and communication; each articulates something of the troubling oscillation between intimacy and distance that characterizes our new technological regime, and proposes an incommensurability between our doggedly physiological lives and the screens to which we are glued. But these exceptions just point up the rule. There is, of course, an entire sphere of new media art, but this is a specialized field of its own: It rarely overlaps with the mainstream art world (commercial galleries, the Turner Prize, national pavilions at Venice). While this split is itself undoubtedly symptomatic, the mainstream art world and its response to the digital are the focus of this essay. And when you look at contemporary art since 1989, the year Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, it is striking that so little of it seems to address the way in which the forms and languages of new media have altered our relationship to perception, history, language, and social relations. In fact, the most prevalent trends in contemporary art since the '90s seem united in their apparent eschewal of the digital and the virtual. Performance art, social practice, assemblage-based sculpture, painting on canvas, the archival impulse, analog film, and the fascination with modernist design and architecture: At first glance, none of these formats appear to have anything to do with digital media, and when they are discussed, it is typically in relation to previous artistic practices across the twentieth century.[2] But when we examine these dominant forms of contemporary art more closely, their operational logic and systems of spectatorship prove intimately connected to the technological revolution we are undergoing. I am not claiming that these artistic strategies are conscious reactions to (or implicit denunciations of) an information society; rather, I am suggesting that the digital is, on a deep level, the shaping condition -- even the structuring paradox -- that determines artistic decisions to work with certain formats and media. Its subterranean presence is comparable to the rise of television as the backdrop to art of the 1960s. One word that might be used to describe this dynamic -- a preoccupation that is present but denied, perpetually active but apparently buried -- is disavowal: I know, but all the same . . . THE FASCINATION WITH ANALOG MEDIA is an obvious starting point for an examination of contemporary art's repressed relationship to the digital. Manon de Boer, Matthew Buckingham, Tacita Dean, Rodney Graham, Rosalind Nashashibi, and Fiona Tan are just a few names from a long roll call of artists attracted to the materiality of predigital film and photography. Today, no exhibition is complete without some form of bulky, obsolete technology -- the gently clunking carousel of a slide projector or
