The trip to date, summing-up! the partial summing-up. the tentative. (thank you everyone, everywhere!) http://www.alansondheim.org/bctrip1854.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/summ.mp4 http://www.alansondheim.org/cifteli0.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/cifteli1.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/cifteli2.mp3 We have traveled around 7250 miles so far, and I'm beginning this in Las Cruces, New Mexico; tomorrow we return to Denver. My sleep's constantly disrupted, and I wake with a sense of hurtling somewhere undefined. I would then think it's time to begin a summing or summing-up - of what? A journey which is always unfolding, my work so far or the work already finished if not accomplished in both senses of the term. I keep going over the three terms, gamespace, edgespace, blankspace, with the caveat that 'game' is a term for nothing more than a somewhat well-defined arena within and without which there are rules of some sort, which might be, I think now, in the shape of the McCarthy formalism, "if A then B, else C" entangled with the little I understand of category theory - let's have objects become morphisms, morphisms become objects, let's deal with dynamics across loosely-defined skeins, etc. etc. What might emerge is a fluid space and equally fluid descriptions of that space, which is among other things, a life space - and I do not think that "life" is a "game" except in the limited sense I'm using it. Think biomes, inputs and outputs for examples, or emissions intended as signals among backgrounds which may also be interpreted as signals or noise. And so forth. These concepts bounce. And edgespace is then part of the bounce; on a simple and wrong level it might be thought of as a region where rules are diminished or broken or forgotten or annihilated or transformed or objects themselves. It might be said that if gamespace is based in a definable hierarchy, edgespace is where the leaks, the abject happens, where the hierarchy becomes immersive, and where symbols may, by intention or otherwise, be replaced by others, or where symbols may even default; one is immersed in edgespace's structure, without inhabiting it; one inhabited and and is immersed in gamespace's structure. Or hierarchy/holarchy of structures among them. In edgespace one might come across a process or sign and ask "what's this" and there is no answer and it's not an (equally logical as gamespace itself) issue of hacking or cracking, but something else - a 0, an alien punctum, an embodied datacrash, something "of some sort" which doesn't resolve. Which is untethered. Which is at a loss, unaccountable, uncountable, unaccounted-for. So bear with these dreams: Then blankspace is jectivity (as I've noted before), projection/ introjection, processes and entanglements whose ontology as well as epistemology are problematic, whose habitus is immersive, whose definability would always procure a loss and anchoring in a fictive gamespace/edgespace regime. So there is the triad game/edge/blank and the dyad definable/immersive, and we're off and running, let's say, towards categorizations (Peirce's triads, Celine's three dots) that obscure the fundamental _thud_ that is Rosset's reality and I think our own, that basis/bases entangled among everything, whose resolutions are problematic, whose morphisms are simultaneously close to spectral efflorescences and disappearances. Without being either a physicist or a mathematician, how can one even think, for example, why the fundamental constants are what they are, and is it always to be assumed, for examples, that their values might be a form of jostling? (The definable/immersive dyad is summed up, perhaps, in Whitehead's comment (somewhere) that 2 + 2 = 4 formally, but in fact there's a processing going on; I was always interested in the latter.) In everything here, I'm overstepping my bounds; I run and hide among the forest of symbols and processes of game/edge/blank, of immersive/definable, which are sufficiently based on mind and organism as to operate successfully within the dominion of theory, as long as that theory doesn't rely on Sokal effects, as long as the entanglements, which always point to those effects, can operate within limited domains as well, however game/edge/ blank that might be. So that is the thinking here, and then as the trip continues, we find ourselves searching out organisms that are new to us, plant and animal behaviors we haven't seen before, and even music we haven't heard, types of music we haven't heard, and even musics which are untyped, uncategorized, as if they were untoward or undone in the process, continuous or segmenting, of their making. So for example I'm playing giraffe banjo, and an Albanian cifteli, constantly wondering why I'm behaving in such a fashion, jumping from instrument to another in a form of what might have been called primitive accumulation; I'm not a collector of instruments but a collocationist of musical structures, unstructing, and deconstructions - just as I video and photograph everyplace and everywhen that both 'suits my fancy' and 'I can learn from this,' however confused the notion of learning is. So there are videos of violent storms and steady-state landscapes, audio of 'theory conversations,' images of chitons, Western kingbirds, fungi, old-growth forests, friends, colloquia, performances, communication towers and disease models. I am writing about contagion, about the problematic of any boundaries, about the real within the virtual and the virtual within the real until these categories disappear, about entanglements that would have seemed inconceivable a few decades ago, about contaminated digital regimes and the breathing and cicatrice of the analog, about the world which is worlding and unfolding. And about the inconceivable detailing of worldings, how contagion and contamination tend towards wear, and loss, and utmost annihilations; how the trace itself disappears into what I've termed the 'scorching of the scorched,' a bad phrase for a bad absenting. Azure's grandmother, in Las Cruces, went over and through a detailed family history I found close to unbelievable in its amazing detailing; of course this is one family, one side of one family, one side of one side of one family, and so forth, and the records themselves are, for me, unbearably fragile and perishable, and with each and every death in the world, every landslide and flood, worldings are lost and turmoil is the (dis) order of the day; this is what has been termed the inconceivable fragility of the good in catastrophe theory, that beyond that path which, for example, might result in a file or a book, there are so many other paths of disappearances that ultimate win out. Did dinosaurs have proper names? http://www.alansondheim.org/thecatastrophe.jpg (And summ is a sample of videos; bctrip1854 is an image of a small flowering tree; the cifteli are cifteli improvisations almost running away with me.) ---------- The three resonant signs on our journey Gusty Winds May Exist Vowels Rd. THE PASTOR ASKED ME TO CHANGE THIS SIGN ---------- Rhetorica ad Herennium II xxix 46: The Summing Up The Summing Up gathers together and recalls the points we have made - briefly, that the speech may not be repeated in entirety, but that the memory of it may be refreshed. (Loeb, trans. Caplan) ---------- 'summing up.' No one knows how much time they have, and my work seems so kind of summing up, metacommentary, analysis. a summing-up In lieu of book or interview - a summing-up: sea yet direction Watanabe summing-up absence every other. To sum up, in other words, the film experience is hardly alienating, most artists, it is difficult to sum up what he is trying to do in simple Now Lyotard continues here, and the quotes are almost over: "To sum up ing." So to sum up here: The temporal power aspect has s/m components; it To sum up, in other words, the film experience is hardly alienating; however, reality _is._ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
