Re: Supplanting Singing?

On Tue, 30 Apr 1996, Mark Darrall wrote:

> I view my computer not much more than a rather sophisticated
> tool. It helps me out quite a bit, but it doesn't change how I view the
> world.

How do explain the fact that your computer allows you to conduct this
conversation? Doesn't this change how you view the 'world'? How you act
in the 'world', are IN the 'world'? For me, it is the interface or
threshold between this perceived activity on the net and my activity in
the world as you call it that I find fascinating. Simply consider your
perception of distance. Has not this changed because of your electronic
persona?
IMHO:
I find it problematic that after 13 years of drafting and now almost out
of school that you still use the computer merely as a representative
tool. Doesn't the computer suggest its own way of negotiating space? The
problem with many modeling programs is the initial screen is a depiction
of Cartesian space. This strongly suggests that the software is intended
to underwrite the actual 'world' that you are talking about not being
changed. Beaudrillard shows us how the simulacra of televisual space
supplants our reality with another to generate a hyperreality. However
inescapable his project may seem the computer if left as just a
sophisticated tool will end up, in my opinion, following that same path.
Virtual reality, such a diluted term now, will be taken as A reality.
Instead of another reality. To say there is one is to say that truth is
possible, or that there is an essence(see my critic of Heidegger on my
homepage)
IMHO:
As I have been able to work through it, this is the discussion contained
in D+G's 1000 Plateaus about deterritorialization. Mimesis. There is a
story(as I recall) about a lion and a hyenia. The lion defines its
territory by going around and marking it while right behind is the hyenia
defining another territory that coincides with the lion's. The hyenia
relies on the lion to exist as does the lion rely on the deterritorialozing
hyenia. blah blah blah. This book is full of this way of thinking about
space. See also the chapter Smooth and Striated.

But what we really need to do is to move this into architecture, for
those of us who are architects and not remain forever in ideas.

I am in the middle of writing up a presentation I gave on Daniel
Libeskind's Alexanderplatz proposal. His work is informed by this idea of
alternate histories and events becoming manifest and engaging in the
present to rewrite the present as a multiple existence of presents. This
of course is my interpretation and open to criticism. :)

Anyone else?

scott