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mobil_machung>co-realities<
territories, incorporations and the matrix
' Knowbotic Research
Knowbotic Research
Das Modell der Netzkultur ist das Leben, und weil es dort seine einmalige Existenz aufzugeben hat, wird es leicht und in der Regel zum Modell.(…) Für die Künste käme es auf den Versuch an, Algorithmen der (Selbst)verschwendung, des Stockens, der Extase und der (Selbst)zerstörung zumindest im Experiment zu erfinden.
Siegfried Zielinski
"… the places of neither here nor there, or both, or other than both: the hybrid territories. Into these territories we will now bring all our social instincts, animal and human, for better or worse. Hybrid territory and hybrid territoriality, hybrid terror to reality, territoReality
Marcos Novak
Space, it seems, hurts.
Timothy Druckrey
Nicht mehr das Zeichen hat sich zu rechtfertigen als Zeichen von REALITÄT, sondern der symbolisterende Geist fordert den "'methodische(n)' Materialismus" – mit seinem Bestreben, Funktionales in Substantielles, Relatives in Absolutes, Maßbegriffe in Dingbegriffe zu verwandeln", in die Schranken. Von hier aus ist es nicht mehr weit zum Theorem der möglichen Welten und die Idee der Theoriegeladenheit alles Empirischen ist bereits gedacht
Hans-Jorg Sandkühler
We provide mindnet access for entities with particular needs. What resident or guest entities say or do may not always be to your liking. Beware there is no moral code in this place.
VNS Matrix
There is "unity encompassing the universe", no differentiation between inside (dream) and outside (perception). Having passed"through history from animism to animation (animateness of the first, and secondary animation of the second nature), the subject, in its quest for reunification. has returned into its self-made paradise. Flusser's demand for thought, feeling and action in the possibility category would thus mean getting involved with the computer. The machine, being called host and server, is only too ready to let us get involved. It is up to us to let ourselves be invited and served up by these machines, to get settled in the.
Volker Grassmuck
Daß die elektronischen Medien Resultate der Wissenschaft sind, ändert nichts an der Notwendigkeit, sie ästhetisch zu reflektieren. Sie konfrontieren uns mit der Maschine und damit mit einem Grundphänomen, das schwer faßbar, aber nichtstestoweniger spürbar ist: der Energie.
Peter Kroner
… through the mediation of the interface, subjectivity is extended and relocated, embodiment repositioned, object and environment re-potentialized, allowing communication to arise out of a new social dynamic that produces and is produced by shifting patterns of subject, embodiment. object, and environment.
Jordan Crandall
A meme is an "idea virus" that is, essentially an independent piece of information travelling in virtuality. Essentially, in order to communicate, living being exchanges memes. But to exchange and process "idea viruses" is also what computers do. (…) A memescape is a geography of memes, it is an idea-landscape, where human memes thrive, encounter and couple.
Oliver Dyens
The process must begin with observation: Digial naturalists must explore the digital jungle (…)
Tom Ray
We find essential to point out that in our opinion both the human element as well as the computer-workstation will build integrated nodes of this Global Brain, each cyber-species by itself will not be able to achieve this transition – only in a very tight symbiosis with this new level of global consciousness will it be possible
Gottfried Meyer-Kress Network station: Ars Electronica, Linz
Installation: Kunstraum Wien, June 21 – July 12, 1995
DWTKS – Dialogue With The Knowbotic South: Interrelated initiated events in networks are made experienceable as corresponding realities in DOWTKS. Artificial territories are "animated" with reference data from the South Pole. They are the location of knowbots, mobile storage media that are multipresent and act in artificial and "real" realities at the same time. For the visitor, this results in navigation and interactions in an unknown open realm. In the network and in real spaces the visitor is represented as a system particle (co-identity). These time shifts and the superposition of events lead to the constitution of co-realities -nonlocated on-line – KR+cF demands the positioning of "errors" in the network.
The freedom of the network existing so far, which maintains the evidently self-organizing system of equal participants (troubleshooters, chaos physicists, media theorists, artists, cognition researchers, architects, sociologists, cyberneticists, ecologists, context designers, etc.), guarantees that it is possible to create both reality and realities(!). This reality-constituting ability of computer-aided systems leads to a general feeling of insecurity in the public space, which will become stronger once the connections between different artificial territories become effective. Knowbotic Research calls this the "principle of corresponding realities", according to which the socalled first reality becomes one among many. Therefore, it is necessary to influence the public discussion in such a way that it does not describe the negative power of a threatening collective "loss of reality" in apocalyptic terms. On the contrary, a state of public irritation is the only situation in which new distributive fields of information and creativity can develop, causing society to modify the cultural parameters. This changing public space, activated by the non-localizable presence of computer-aided networks, is still free of any self -referentiality, but full of "poetic" chances so as to open spaces for events to the differences existing in undiscovered data fields.
DATA TERRITORIES: Everybody is talking about VR, stressing the utopian tone of "virtuality" and enjoying the isolated effectiveness of "reality" (safer reality).
However, flight simulators, video games, and medical interior views of our brain have so far usually remained mimetic representations simulating "everyday life" through their complex and comfortable functionality.
Still, the installations of data networks also allow for the production of non-graphic phenomena. This "production of appearances" does not only formalize events in self-contained systems (the configuration in which the network is preferably used), in isolated effective structures, but also produces – and this is by far more important – real entities that have an impact on "everyday life". Thus, the projects of KR+cF create superpositions of events in the network and in real spaces (exhibition spaces) and condensate their experiential qualities.
Visitors and system configurations are "doubly present", i.e. they act simultaneously in the virtual and the "real" spaces. The consequences for the construction and the experienceability of such condensations are as follows: how does one, for instance, describe the non-localizabte (multipresent) data spaces if traditional scientific principles do not apply? Or what kinds of infrastructures can such artificial digital territories have, etc? …
INCORPORATIONS: Howard Rheingold has given a detailed description of virtual communication spaces, which he called "virtual communities". However, he also traced the tendency that wants to make the network utilizable as extended reality only (i.e. as the one = " everyday" reality). The widespread metaphors "digital city", "global village", and "virtual city" outline the single concept of a mega-city with a main street, post office, shopping line, financial district, etc., illustrating the desire for extensive settlement techniques as well as clear communication structures within the network. Such concepts usually neglect uninhabited surrounding areas and ignore subversive characters (which are marginalized in ghettos when in doubt), overtook micro-structures, stop chaotic behavior and uncertainty from proliferating etc. The prevention of such "faults", which occurs despite the above-mentioned freedom of the network, gives evidence of the unbroken continuation of time-proven attempts of some to act as economic and ideological missionaries within the networks. This kind of virtual culture makes use of existing communication patterns and produces nothing but an algorithmic version of our big-city culture instead of an autonomous, creative one.
As a consequence of such lines of reasoning, the projects of Knowbotic Research go beyond the communicative aspects of data networks (talk channels) determining the euphoria in the general discussion about "network-culture hype". Thus, the interests lie in the constructive qualities, i.e. those which create and process information, generate and represent knowledge at the same time. Production and representation are no longer assigned to different institutions according to the division of labor principle, but universalized as an artistic concept. For KR+cF, the reception of these processes and the "knowledge" resulting from them are not only the result of cognition stimulating processes, but also the product of aesthetic experiences.
In order to make this clear, as is often the case, definitions of comparable phenomena in natural science are used to draw parallels: in his book "The Blind Watchmaker", the English biologist and philosopher Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of the meme. He uses the term meme for a self -replicating amount of information that populates our cultural consciousness, just like a number of "idea viruses" which, like parasites, exploit the ideal carrier of life as generated by the DNA. The dynamism and synergy of an organism "live" off its singularities – in the case of KR+cF, they are interactive data and information media, mobile units. Whether they are called agents, knowbots, memes, or digital organisms, they all act as incorporations within the network and, if they are "idea viruses", they are also active outside the "electronic spaces". Their energy potential, for example, is as fascinating to artificial-life scientists as it is to political scientsis, regardless of whether they develop paradoxical or teleological dynamic forces. They determine the events, they bring about the generative and processual forces that characterize this set-up of the data space. This productive aspect provokes "creative" measures in the widest sense – new questions arise:
Which objects and signs do such infrastructures make use of? What is the function of the developer / user / observer in such digital space / time configurations within which the main issue is not the possibility of saving, staggered retrieval and the transformation of information, but the interaction with entities that continuously constitute themselves anew? How can the imaginary matrix that is continuously being re-invented, developed, transcended and rejected by thousands of unpaid developers on the Internet be made comprehensible for everybody without defined linguistic conventions?
THE MATRIX: For a long time, the elitist expansion of the networks guaranteed the self-reflective referentiality that limited social, political and cultural effectiveness. If, however, the tendency to rapid diffusion continues and the freedom of the network remains guaranteed (every open system is endangered at all times), the term "matrix" (the assumed effective entirety of all possible nodes, linkages, and networks) will have a different meaning in the future. Many developers and users see positive, democratic chances in the journalistic quality of the network, which is, for instance, reflected in the fact that World Wide Web, a hypertext system with a broad basis in its hierarchy, presents private and institutionalized knowledge on an equal footing. However, this confidence may well be compared to the somewhat naive expectations people had and later saw destroyed when television developed and the use of portable videocassette recorders spread. However, this social function, made possible by the ability to document, repeat, copy and distribute the facts recorded on the "new media", is not the main characteristic of the matrix. Conversely, the non-localizable, energy concentration, the non-storable, uninhibited processuality, the possibility of simulating such events of digital processing characterize the matrix as the sum of dynamic forces with changing media qualities (e.g. temporal compressibility, expansibility. the potential for hypothesizing, modeling and testing). If at all, one should use this to formulate socio-cultural chances. Moreover, one has to stress again that these events which can be tested evolve within networked systems equipped with multiple and multi – perspective observer positions, regardless of what the topographical conditions of our first reality are like (the so-called "real" reality) but they do so in interaction with them. The "public spheres" are also redefined on the basis of the matrix encompassing multiple realities in networks.
Given the above-mentioned insecurity in public spaces, it is thus necessary not to close the "doors" (Peter Weibel's metaphor for the entry into cyberspace) to the network behind oneself, but to keep them open.
Alle Zitate entstammen der Publikation "Nonlocated online". Medien.Kunst.Passagen 3/94, Wien. Herausgeber Knowbotic Research, Köln 1995
DWTKS – "Dialogue with the Knowbotic South" wurde produziert mit Unterstützung des Kunstkurators des Bundesministers fur Wissenschaft. Forschung und Kunst, Österreich, der Kunsthochschule fur Medien, Köln, der Kulturbehörde Hamburg und der Ars Electronica.
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