PLANET Teleconference (November 1978-February 1979)
Page 2: PLANET messages numbered
between 383 and 877
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Table of Contents
Gillette
[383]
Notes on generating computer argot
1. This "aesthetic" activity is
fundamentally no different from any other form of problem-solving. The
question now is discovering and identifying the problems to be solved.
2. One of the resources of poetic license is to liken a thing to
any other thing, or to "speak" of it as another thing. In simile
and metaphor a thing is assigned to a class, alloted character, and likened
to things other than those implied by the system of classification built
into its private logic and argot. This is the case in all language. There
are no a priori limits on what or how many metaphors can be made. Players
may initiate beginnings of an infinitely complex, integrated web
of multiplying analogy, metaphor, and trope, Each is directly related to
its immediate and adjacent "neighbors" but uniquely different
and etiologically separate from more distant paradigms. How to make this
system aesthetically tangible and coherent to an observer outside the system
is the first responsibility of its players.
The raison d'etre is a coherent, systematic structure directed at expanding the aesthetic-ideational range in this medium. Any attempt to impose a spurious unity (or clarity) on the parameters of interaction will elicit instead a pseudo-clarity at the expense of cutting into the marrow. At this stage of sophistication with the medium, this is the pre-dawn.
O'Regan
[387] Re: 383-Cybernautics
What metaphors can there possibly be for such an activity? Cybernautics is an appropriate metaphor in that it distinguishes from cybernetician and from cybernetics. The activity is possessed of temporal and multi-channel qualities that seem to have parallels in Wagnerian counterpoint. Is it possible metaphors are capable of imparting richness to the referred? Here, all metaphors seem weaker than the thing itself.
David Ross
[391]
Introduction of any new medium necessarily results
in a new field of metaphors. Here we have to deal with dialogue woven into
participants' lives, not as with the hated telephone intruding into consciousness.
This presents a radically new way of communicating that is genuinely novel.
Our primary task is to elicit the quiddity of the medium at hand.
O'Regan
Gillette
[397]
Kenneth Burke introduced the idea of "perspectives by incongruity." The unity of incongruity, I think, is "in the metal" of this system.
[401]
The simplest structure in any cybernetic/cybernautic loop is the "kinematic" flow between three variables which are invariables in their permanence):1.living systems 2. machine systems 3. theoretical systems. This is the first division.
O'Regan
[405]
Postulate a tracking process wherein participants pursue all related lines of thought and their respective logics.
I think it's something like this. Each player
functions as heuristic filter generating transforms in tandem with others
in identical conditions. Radially structured and non-linear, we are as
collagists with the ideational debris of Western culture, engaged in pattern
creation with the natural parameters of this technology read
as a set of contingencies and constraints. In other words, nature.
O'Regan
[416]
No one has anything but cure analogies for why synchronicity actually occurs. In truth, it does, bound by rules we rarely get the opportunity to explore. This tool provides a time-series method for generating and analyzing such phenomena. I suspect such concurrences are more mediated by the right hemisphere than by the left.
[423]
The implied narrative that follows the randomized
sequencing of our thoughts reads as a topology of a shared thinking
experience more like a group of dreams edited by another dreamer than
anything I can reference. 
Gillette
[453]
This is in some ways like Eliot's concept of "difficult poetry." "First, there may be personal causes which make it impossible for a poet to express himself in any but an obscure way. . .Or difficulty may be due to novelty."
[469]
Deprivation/enrichment is that process which deprives
us of normal cues. It activates the new one that we must pick up in order
to get in tune with what the others are doing/thinking/about to
type. This is the essence of the way in which the medium can serve to extend
our normal capacities.
Richard Chilgren
[528]
Glossary Index:
pre-dawn
unity of incongruity
kinematic
cybernautic
tracking
transformation/order of transforms
heuristic filter
pattern creation
difficult poetry
baby talk
Finnegan's Wake
Gillette
[547]
The beginnings of a lexicon: towards the implicit identification and regulation of time-space sequences. This spirals toward transforms unanticipated. This system, in its generalized effects, equals in scale introduction of the clock in village cultures of late Medieval Europe.
[599]
This capability (linking, say,
a half dozen museums in the United States and Europe) introduces a potential
for simultaneous "shows" in a meta-sensory "space."
It extends the participating museum's exhibition space without acquiring
a single square inch of additional real estate. The means are generated,
coded and sorted in the meta-sensory system; then rendered "sensory"
in "showing" space, therefore existing in infrastructural
suspension. Possible tableaux are suspended among museums with each
terminal in conformance to the players' affects. How this space
is programmed is the issue.
I'm dubious of linking art to education, despite the justifiable implications. Their respective motivations are distinct. They are connected ceremonially, but educational benefits and evolutionary adjustments should be a consequence of this species of activity.
[877]
It is interesting that one has to objectify parts
of our face to face communication that we receive via body language of
one sort or another, into the realm of the private message. When a dialogue
is ongoing, I continually feel the need to contextualize my public statements
with particularizing private messages, like facing a group and continually
changing one's attention while speaking and listening.