Gillette

2/16/81 Re: To Invoke the Authority of the Ineffable

Northrop Frye, inveterate inventor of categories, speaks of classifications within the iconography of the imagination: these proto categories in which the aesthetic imagination seeks to prehend experience. A particular player's method of prehension reduces to an actual subset of all possible iconographies within the encodable descriptive/depictive repetoire. From this vantage- point the teleconferencing system invites one to accommodate a less conventionally "disciplined" operating bias: one that chooses to accept the system's contrastive and oppositional potential (especially at the beginning). The player goes on to discover a novel form of "dialogue" (one that optimizes the parallel, co-equal novelty of the embodying technology). Heidigger, in fact, correlates excesses in the calculative method with the general state of technology (techne) itself. That is: They are inseparably intertwined. Following Heidigger, the meditative method can be employed as an antidote, or "counter- statement," to calculatively over-corrected techne. This is an expression of a way in which art contains science.

2/17/81 Re: Epistemorphic Difference

"The contour escapes me. . ." - Cezanne

Following the scholastic adage that whenever you encounter a contradiction you must make a distinction, the bricoleur submits Peirce's idea that beliefs are really rules-for-action. (The old chestnut substance/attribute distinction suggests itself as an initial division.)

William James (one hell of a pioneer in haptic maneuvering, if there ever was one) judges the truth of an idea by a measure of its "cash value." "True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not." What is the "cash value" of these teleconferencing methods?

Adopting James' notion of up-to-snuff "cash value" as a necessary criterion of index-acceptance with Nabokov's definition of art paraphrased as the reality we extract from reality: It comes down to yet another division combining the attributes of universality and necessity. Teleconference-value of an entry must perforce be subject to a kind of natural selection based (in part) upon the pragmatic fascination it selects as "a reality."

Each "reality" opens upon the realm of the semi-factual, bringing into bas relief the epiphenomena of "factual" experience. "Meaning" (including desired "cash-value" ends) changes from the first order pattern "take" to subsequent second order pattern "expansions" generating an analogue of what the logician calls factual conditions (viz: one of the jointly sufficient conditions for a certain state or even necessitates that state of event. That is, what is necessary will have a way of meeting its sufficient conditions.)

Re: On the Making of Epistemorphs

The following originates with paradigm-fragments that have remained with the bricoleur, that have impressed themselves upon his intuition, having passed through the private filters of subjective validation. For example, from something as crusty as Hobbes' Leviathan this strange rhyme: "Words are wise men's counters; they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools." Here is another chard, another refracting "mind-facta" to rub against the Hobbesian assessment: "The words remained in his heart like a burning fire" and "because ye speak this word, behold, I will make my words in thy mouth fire, and his people wood, and it shall devour them." (Jeremiah 10:9, 5:14). Metaphors enfolding back on language are in a class by themselves because they speak with what they point at. This is especially acute when the messaging system is exclusively textual. Jeremiah and Hobbes both suggest a cor irrequietem hovering around the capacity for language, for words. They imply a restless discontent growing into anxiety over their apparent power.

Re: "The eye believes and its communion takes" - Wallace Stevens

Problematically, art fluctuates between the optical and haptic. To receive a tactile sensation by simply seeing something vs. the haptic reconversion of the sensation: the felt is seen. Haptic is that element in the aesthetic experience that is grasped independently of optical-formal considerations (interpretations). Teleconferencing (as a network of bricoleurs) is haptic-simply incapable, as yet to seriously address the optical dimension. The felt in this case is a mode of discourse: a collective text building up from initial definitions.

James Harithas

2/17/81

I would be more at home in the agrarian, mytho-poetic thought of Ancient Greece which leads to the Iliad and the proto- philosophical speculations of Hesiod. I agree, however, that the bricoleur is an initial and, simultaneously, initiatory process, a means of entering the technology at the most elementary level. Greek thought and language provide a more sophisticated layering. Bricolage concentrates on use of the basic codes of duality, identity, analogy, and comparison; and in addition, the creative process of stream of consciousness, collage, other forms of relativism, and by extension, catastrophe models, puns, etc.

The question of how to use bricolage effectively as a machine language is still moot. I assume Frank means that any poetic analogy assumes a factual or philosophical reality within the discourse he constructs, where objects or objective statements function as metaphors. I'm confident there is no difference between our illusive aesthetic and our pure, haptic sense of reality.

John G. Hanhardt

2/17/81

I have some questions on the use of linguistic and semiotic terminology which seems to define something other than what the textual production of teleconferencing suggests. If we are talking about the relation between communication structure of a text and its grammatical structure, there is no one-to-one relation between the two. We must establish a more general mode of textual analysis than that proposed by strict linguistic and semiotic models. The function which determines the textual process is its communicative function. Perhaps we should interpret texts as systems? Thus if we suggest that each system is a process directed through its function, then by extension the communicative function determines the textual constituents. Different types of texts differ through different types of textual function--not as dialects in relation to each other but as different processes which share in a network of interrelated components. The different components, manifestations, of this structure are correlated by the communicative purpose of different texts. It seems that teleconferencing networks are engaged in this type of interrelatedness, and analysis is not based on particular linguistic properties but on more abstract features such as dynamics and cohesiveness.

Gillette

2/22/81 Re: On Simularity

". . . in their games, dreams or wild imaginings. . .individuals never create absolutely, but merely choose certain combinations from an ideal repetoire that it should be possible to define." - Levi- Strauss

(James refers to association by simularity as the "electric aptitude for analogy.") The act of linking together with the principle of "assonance" is in effect a grounding in an optimum density of reference where the processes of allusion arising from each referent intersect. Allusive economy evolves as the density of reference builds-up.

2/22/81 Re: Terms for Conference Glossary

Metaphor:

"Metaphora consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else: the transference (epi-phora) being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on the grounds of analogy." - Aristotle

Metaphor consists in "the presentation of the facts of one category in the idioms appropriate to another." - Gilbert Ryle

"Metaphor is a devise for seeing something in terms of something else. . .a metaphor tells us something about one character considered from the point of view of another character. And to consider A from the point of view of B is, of course, to use B as a perspective upon A." - Kenneth Burke

"However appropriate in one sense a good metaphor may be, in another sense there is something inappropriate about it. This inappropriateness results from the use of a sign in a sense of different from the usual, which use (is called) sort-crossing. Such sort-crossing is the first defining feature of metaphor." - Colin Turbane

Metaphor is the genus in which the following are species:

• analogy
• trope
• metonymy
• synecdoche
• catachresis

Harithas

2/23/81

I understand the bricoleur as one possessing a method of abstraction based on the use of psycho-social cultural debris, that is, on fragmentary experience from any information which by itself may be random or incoherent, as long as it is interesting to the bricoleur. The bricoleur reorganizes this information into myth, ritual, art, or medicine according to his specialization and purpose. This approach not only acknowledges as its own the medium of collage, but it defines the techniques used by the Surrealist. It explains the Surrealist use of signs culled from psychological processes and juxtapositions. Bricolage is the base method of Surrealist inquiry and later of Pop Art which deals with subliminal content more particularly.

This method seems too conveniently and literally dependent on memory, on totemic (i.e., atavistic and intuitive) forms of classification which in turn establish their need for inventories of various kinds. This is a limitation of sorts. I see art as being in essence virtually free from the strictures of memory (as for example the Abstract Expressionists) and as involved in a process which leads to creating through access to an expanded consciousness, one which occurs through the recognition or revelation of "something out of nothing." The artist may elaborate this "something" by transforming it after the fact into a cultural artifact through the appropriate stylistic language or, alternatively, through some kind of figuration.

In other words, the artist does not simply have to establish formal systems which address social or mythological longings and aspirations; rather he develops a visual language based on his experience with categories of feeling which are untouched, unknown and "out there" beyond the reaches of memory but innate to some mysterious potential of the mind. This may be just a definition of expanded memory, but I prefer to think it is some biological source of the freedom necessary to the creative act. On the other hand, I do see virtue in experimenting with the memory systems of the computer, together with ideas about ideas, about art and various forms of teleconferencing. This may lead to astonishing results. It is obvious to me that the final work of art may be a collage which does not simply document an exchange of ideas, but one in which the information kindles the spirit through its expression of deep feeling and shades of feeling which are new to the human mindscape.

O'Regan

2/23/81

I have recently been engaged in communication with Robert Heinmiller who is at M.I.T. There he manages the electronic mail communications system for the U.S. Oceanographic Survey. This is a system of teleconferencing operations to approximately 900 ships all over the world. Apparently they make use of an unused NASA satellite. I asked him for information on their recently developed technique for sending imagery and graphics over EIES-like systems.

I think this information is of the greatest interest both for its conceptual implications for this project and as some source of ideas for the actual responsive environment technologies that might ultimately be part of assembling the museum of the future.