<eyebeam><blast> kia ora

[NORMAN <norman@wanadoo.fr>]

Off the cuff, but haven't just skim-read you, Andreas; printed you up 
and re-read you. Howzat? Kia Ora, as we say in Aotearoa. Wanted to get 
those very local words in somewhere.

Response to your response to Andy Deck, on the constraints imposed by 
protocols etc. when one "addresses one's work to a wide audience"... I'm 
tempted to say here that the "temporality" you attribute to this 
particular body of work is not necessarily symptomatic of fleeting 
electronic formats (despite knowing the anguish of irrecuperable video 
art, etc. - by the way, let's back-to-back this with the Dutch masters 
who laboriously created varnishes to give paintings sheens they would 
never be able to see in their own lifetimes), but that it can probably 
be attributed to umpteen forms of cultural communication, that are just 
as prone to and demanding of heavy scaffolding the minute one wants to 
address them to a very "wide audience". This is an age-old problem : if 
you're creating a message for your lover or for God, you don't have to 
worry (quite so much) about protocols. They're between you and the other 
(or Other, according to your spelling or religion or protocol). If 
you're trying to reach a wide audience, then obviously you have to think 
about how to convey meaning to unknowns, and devise structural 
mechanisms that you hope will make this possible. To a certain extent, 
then, these same issues now raised by procedures and versions were 
raised by the earliest dances, musical compositions, epic poems, 
whatever. Continuing, is it just because we lack "language for 
describing social and aesthetical specificities of networked 
environments in appropriate ways" that we resort to discourses on art, 
life and death ? In light of the above, might this not, yet again, 
simply result from our desire to communicate the communicable to a wide 
audience? - life and death being ultimately meaningful for all of us? (I 
think). I'm not sure that any strategies and practices involving human 
communication can be so miraculously stripped of the discourses you seem 
to be wary of (from art to ant-hills), without their becoming, quite 
precisely, dehumanised. Getting a grasp on this medium is indeed a 
complex business. Coz we're human.

I'm appreciative of your "clues", Andreas, and fully go along with them. 
Enthusiastically agree that there's some very interesting reflection to 
be nurtured along the "topology" and "proxemics" lines - moreover, some 
of the "vertical invasion" stuff - Watkins to Murph - indeed brings me 
back to my Russian idols (mais oui, pourquoi pas!), Malevich and 
Khlebnikov and others, with their uncanny prescience of other dimensions 
as being the focus of aesthetic experience, other "planes of immanence" 
to use Vladimir Muzhesky's terms. Vzorval, "explodity", the revelation 
of other planes of existence - can we think of networking proxemics 
along these lines, whilst remaining sufficiently close to the 
(back-)bone of strategy and practice? (I repeat, I don't mind 
ant-hills). Working on this at the moment. (Lev, speak up !)

Curious as to whether the Edward O. Wilson book Ben Williams refers to 
makes any mention of a philosopher like Bernard Stiegler who, building 
on the tracks of Simondon and Leroi-Gourhan, has written off and on 
about "epigenetics" over the years... Albeit in passing. But acutely.

Brian Holmes's rheology stuff about eddies and flows of intersubjective 
exchange seems to ripple along the lines of some Knowbotic Research work 
I think makes a crucial contribution to networked artistic practice: 
"could one learn to accept one's own interventions as precipitating a 
shared unknown" - this sounds like pure IO-DENCIES. Good.

We must be careful with the Greeks - it's so damned easy to forget the 
slaves. Laconics. Had little to say for themselves. Why ?

My modem's on a slow cruise, hope this makes it through the wires, à 
bientôt

Sally Jane Norman
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