sotto voce: Some comments (on the nettime post from Lev Manovich, Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:22:03 -0800 - his text snips in blue)...

We Have Never Been Modular...

but we have agreed on standards via political hegemony, pressure of dominant ideas, and participating in the easy consumption of 'whatever works'. And since standards underlie the concept of modularity, I'm afraid that I disagree unless you are talking about another collective "we" that is represented by the demographic you are addressing and are member of.

Thanks to everybody who commented on my text "Remix and Remixability" (November 16, 2005). It was provoked by reading about web 2.0 and all the exitement and hype (as always) around it, so indeed I am "following the mainstream view" in certain ways. But I would like to make it clear that ultimately we are talking about something which does not just apply to RSS, social bookmarking, or Web Services. We are talking about the logic of modularity which extends beyond the Web and digital culture...

And it is worth mentioning that none of those ideas are remotely sourced in digital technologies -- they are constructed on the entire precursor socio-technical infrastructure of engineering in general. digital technologies are a 'final' product of a long and continuous development process of standardization that started when Empire was born.

Modularity has been the key principle of modern mass production. Mass production is possible because of the standarisation of parts and how they fit with each other - i.e. modularity. Although there are historical precedents for...

From an engineering point of view, modularity is a subsequent process result following the necessary precursor: the development of standards. As a simple anecdote, I recall traveling across Europe in the early 80's. When crossing a border, say, between Italy and Germany, or France and Germany, aside from the ritual rubber-stamping of the passport (and occasional body searches, but that's another story), one was aware that suddenly, when before the streets were full of Renaults, Citroens, and Peugeots, they were now filled with VWs, Mercedes, and BMWs. To such a degree that if you saw a Citroen DeuxCheveaux puttering around in Bavaria -- a car I occasionally had in those days -- you would invariably honk and wave (at the 'hippies'). The currency changed, the language changed (obviously), the places for money exchange shifted, the electric plugs morphed, the telephone rings, cables, and plugs changed. Distance didn't unless one crossed the Channel where temperature, length, weight, currency divisions, and volume changed to absurdly baffling non-decimal fractions. The socio-political history of the EU (and globalization as well) is mapped over the development of international standards that (have) effectively wiped out those prior social differences. The history underlying any and all movements towards a pervasive technology (regardless of the geographic extent) is the history of standards development. This precedes any (modular) engineering deployments. (A wonderful USD350 million glitch on a NASA Mars project -- when an engineer (collaborating with ESA) forgot to convert between metric and US measurements). Of course, economic (military) hegemony is absolutely connected to this process of standards development. You join in a military alliance and if you are the minor partner, you have to re-bore your cannons to take his calibre of projectile, lest, in the heat of battle, you run out of useable ammunition. I think a discussion of standardization supersedes the discussion of modularity as most (all!?) characteristics that arise in a description of modularity and its impacts are derived from the 'textures' of the socio-technical landscape that are determined by standardization. In a way, collective knowledge as a very broad and general social product is a result of standardization, especially if you are considering, for example, knowledge that spans disparate physical locations. Even with the existence of the basic technology of the Internet, no collective knowledge may be derived without a standardization that transcends the physical restraints on the digital system -- a primary one being calibration of time scales, but there are many other calibrations that must take place as well. In the Paul Edwards article quoted below, he points out that there are heavy consequences for detecting global warming because the propagation of measurement standard differences between national and international organizations. An example of the fragility of knowledge building and the importance of standards in collective action. Strip Latin from biological nomenclature, and international collaboration in the entire discipline is immediately snuffed. It would seem that the larger the social span of an institution, the greater the built-in desire to establish and propagate standards among its constituents. Maybe remix is the ultimate surrender of the individual to the collective. Standardised idiosyncracy. Lovely end result. And at the other extreme, some of the more powerful expressions of artistic creativity take place in a landscape where there is some freedom to deliberately ignore standards (and modularity) and filter lived experience through the idiosyncratic filter of self -- re-presenting that lived experience rather than an obsession with filtering someone else's signal... I think your mention of musicians sampling published music points to something perhaps more tiresome -- related to the instance when rock stars sing about life as a rock star. A simulation of a simulation. TeeVee shows about teevee producers. Escher's lizard consuming itself. Maybe remix culture will turn out to be so efficient that it will come to that -- annihilation by self-consumption of its own mediated world-view...

Maintaining consistency in this huge, constantly changing network is the work of standards. Standards are socially constructed tools: They embody the outcomes of negotiations that are simultaneously technical, social, and political in character. Like algorithms, they serve to specify exactly how something will be done. Ideally, standardized processes and devices always work in the same way, no matter where, what, or who applies them. Consequently, some elements of standards can be embedded in machines or systems. When they work, standards lubricate the construction of technological systems and make possible widely shared knowledge. from A Vast Machine:Standards as Social Technology, Paul N. Edwards, Science, 07.05.2004 v304

Measurement is a comparison process in which the value of a quantity is expressed as the product of a value and a unit; that is, Quantity = {a numerical value} x {unit} where the unit is an agreed-upon value of a quantity of the same type. The concept of a quantity such as length is independent of the associated unit; the length is the same whether it is measured in feet or meters. A standard is a physical realization of the definition, with an agreed-upon value to be used as a reference. from The Route to Atomic and Quantum Standards, Jeff Flowers, Science 19.11.2004 v306

Stef forwards the URL of Cam and Helen's meadery. cool. was supposed to make it up there in British Colombia in August, but had to crash that plan when the spine shattered. someday, when body is mended, it'll be time to head north-by-northwest and meet some of the hippy chicks that apparently abound in that corner of the world.

'A drink I took of the magic mead..
Then began I to know and to be wise,
To grow and to weave poems.'
-- Odin

BRING IT ON!

sotto voce: JC sends this to da40 -- become republican only too true, though personally I'm not so rabidly anti-Jesus. it's the zealots who, as the cartoon points out, hide behind His words and are fundamentally hate-full and intolerant. not what I would expect from the pursuit of a Christ-like behavior emulation... seems there are glimmers of hope that the society has woken up from a bad dream that was imposed by the 2000 pseudo-election. I frankly don't have much hope though, that the systemic corruption in the political system is going to go away at all, demos or repubs are the same animal from that perspective. in the Republic system of Rome, there were various contingencies (balances of power) to cover during different times of need (war being the primary one, though it was misused as a power-manipulation tool -- nothing new about that! It is interesting that the concept (and specific form of civil rule) dictatorship was held for a temporary crisis. I guess my point is that political systems, ours included, no matter the intended balance built-in, are (easily!!?) able to be corrupted -- while retaining outward forms that appear 'fine,' internally the power balances shift drastically to move the system into a whole different structure/relation of power. I reflect on a simple personal example. When I was growing up in the DC area, (outside the Beltway as it were), we could jump downtown on a Saturday morning, stand in line at a side-door to the White House, and without any security checks, could get a tour of the place. In High School we would often cut classes and head to the Mall (The Mall, the green space at the core of L'Enfant's DC design), maybe stop into the Capitol Building or Senate Office building and ride the underground electric subway carts between -- saying hi to Kennedy, Humphrey, Muskie, and have lunch in the Senate cafeteria with all those guys around. An old friend was working at the (Bush #1) White House, and invited me for a reception for the (now discredited and proven criminal) then-Prime Minister Andreotti of Italy. There was an outdoor reception in the Rose Garden. It was instructive for me to see that the spatial protocol was following: Press was on a grand-stand to the Left of the President; Important Guests were to the Right of the President; and immediately in front of the President was a rank of Military from all services; behind the military was the Public. (see attached picture which I title "Fealty to the President") The protocol speaks for itself -- the military had ascended to a position that stands between the people and the President. It was not this way in the Carter White House. The current regime is even more aligned with the military -- and that this illustrates the surface of a deeper shift of power-base and power relation in the political system. Democracy? Hah.!

Rome at the beginning was ruled by kings. Freedom and the consulship were established by Lucius Brutus. Dictatorships were held for a temporary crisis. The power of the decemvirs did not last beyond two years, nor was the consular jurisdiction of the military tribunes of long duration. The despotisms of Cinna and Sulla were brief; the rule of Pompeius and of Crassus soon yielded before Caesar; the arms of Lepidus and Antonius before Augustus; who, when the world was wearied by civil strife, subjected it to empire under the title of Prince. But the successes and reverses of the old Roman people have been recorded by famous historians; and fine intellects were not wanting to describe the times of Augustus, till growing sycophancy scared them away. The histories of Tiberius, Caius, Claudius, and Nero, while they were in power, were falsified through terror, and after their death were written under the irritation of a recent hatred. Hence my purpose is to relate a few facts about Augustus -- more particularly his last acts, then the reign of Tiberius, and all which follows, without either bitterness or partiality, from any motives to which I am far removed.

When after the destruction of Brutus and Cassius there was no longer any army of the Commonwealth, when Pompeius was crushed in Sicily, and when, with Lepidus pushed aside and Antonius slain, even the Julian faction had only Caesar left to lead it, then, dropping the title of triumvir, and giving out that he was a Consul, and was satisfied with a tribune's authority for the protection of the people, Augustus won over the soldiers with gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and all men with the sweets of repose, and so grew greater by degrees, while he concentrated in himself the functions of the Senate, the magistrates, and the laws. He was wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle, or in the proscription, while the remaining nobles, the readier they were to be slaves, were raised the higher by wealth and promotion, so that, aggrandised by revolution, they preferred the safety of the present to the dangerous past. Nor did the provinces dislike that condition of affairs, for they distrusted the government of the Senate and the people, because of the rivalries between the leading men and the rapacity of the officials, while the protection of the laws was unavailing, as they were continually deranged by violence, intrigue, and finally by corruption. -- Tacitus

Stefan called, death was the topic, this is the stretch of life when there are brutal accelerations in the imbricate orderings of passing -- done with this being and moving into others. keeping me posted on Kevin. I recollected the short book, Death Be Not Proud, by John Gunther, which was a required reading in, I think 9th grade perhaps? the story, written by the father, of his young son's confrontation of his terminal brain cancer. and the title is the opening line from the archaic English poem:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
-- John Donne

Unless we accept that at this point in intellectual and scientific history that some radical re-learning is necessary, we cannot hope to move forward in the compulsive history of the ambivalent rejection-fascination with consciousness in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. My proposal implies that every good student of cognitive science who is also interested in issues at the level of mental experience, must inescapably attain a level of mastery in phenomenological examination in order to work seriously with first-person accounts. But this can only happen when the entire community adjusts itself to the corresponding acceptance of arguments, refereeing standards and editorial policies in major scientific journals, that can make this added competence an important dimension of a young researcher. To the long-standing tradition of objectivist science this sounds like anathema, and it is. But this is not a betrayal of science: it is a necessary extension and complement. Science and experience constrain and modify each other as in a dance. This is where the potential for transformation lies. It is also the key for the difficulties this position has found within the scientific community. It requires us to leave behind a certain image of how science is done, and to question a style of training in science which is part of the very fabric of our cultural identity. -- Francisco Varela

George (Saunders) leap-frogging a parking meter somewhere on Sunset Boulevard, sometime in the year that Orwell's O'Brien tagged that the lesser shall have a future controlled by the greater, thus:

How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?
...
By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.
...
And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. -- George Orwell

George Orwell I did not know, but George (Saunders) was a friend in some distant past until I had a téte-a-téte with an ex-girlfriend of his. he doesn't think of me anymore, nor I of him, except hearing a cryptic review on NPR of his first novel The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil that made its way to shelves recently. I'd buy a copy, but I don't spare cash for material things that I would just have to carry around. I'll wait until it's online with the Guttenberg Project or so. maybe somewhen else I'll resurrect some visual histories of other days that were shared. why George was leaping over the parking meter I no longer know. why I made an image, I only know that I have been taking images of friends in various stages of living at various ground coordinates for more years than i can remember why. certainly not for nostalgic reasons because when I took them, there was no future, only a present that skittered along, like the rocks I sometimes spin across bodies of water, or the rocks that I have held in hand, drawing lines on another's body, or those same rocks, smooth in their repeated collisions with other rocks, now in my jean's watch pocket, getting warm from expended body heat, and grounding one side of my body to the body of the earth. humans have life collisions. I collided with George, numerous times, it wore down some sharp edges, maybe. maybe not. I still have sharp edges, George perhaps not.

uff, begining Tai Chi. after all these years wanting to start that practice. a life-long pursuit, for sure. and starting in the condition I'm in is at the same time more difficult, and easier. difficult on the body, much more difficult than using the Cybex weight machines or the various treadmill-like devices. easy in that it strikes to the core of the vital parts of the body, parts that need the flow to heal. musing on the effect of the titanium in the spine on the flow of chi. later, Frieder mentions that he just was watching a film about Varela. this results in a google-session that reaches to Varela's collaborator:

Man knows and his capacity to know depends on his biological integrity; furthermore, he knows that he knows. As a basic psychological and, hence, biological function cognition guides his handling of the universe and knowledge gives certainty to his acts; objective knowledge seems possible and through objective knowledge the universe appears systematic and predictable. Yet knowledge as an experience is something personal and private that cannot be transferred, and that which one believes to be transferable, objective knowledge, must always be created by the listener: the listener understands, and objective knowledge appears transferred, only if he is prepared to understand. Thus cognition as a biological function is such that the answer to the question, 'What is cognition?' must arise from understanding knowledge and the knower through the latter's capacity to know. -- Humberto Maturana

since Mars is taking bright place in the heavens these weeks, no need to imagine the canals when one can go to the Themis site and see broken levees at 17-meter resolution. meanwhile in a conversation with Master Zega, the prognostications of a certain Frenchman come up:

Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. -- Jean Baudrillard

taking Frieder's thought-provoking commentary on my proposal draft and grinding through a thought process that in a infinitesimal way is becoming more precise and confident in dealing with the subject material of the thesis. this evening I synthesize the phrase continuum of relation to describe the continuous field of action and dynamic that constitutes our presence in the world. it is the continuum where technology is implemented (apparently) to increase the probability that understanding can be propagated across multiple human subjects, when, at the same time this altruistic goal is promoted, that exact technology injects uncertainty, a degree of attenuation, and a general increase in the complexity of the communicative act! uff! what to do? but I like the phrase continuum of relation -- doing a google on it, there are only 26 entries, and none of them in any way overlap in meaning at all. I find that comforting to be obscure. and, perusing the nettime archive, in a discussion with Felix and Geert, I read a 1999 Howard Rheingold article On Innovation and the Amateur Spirit where he quotes the daddy of the WWW:

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was online, we could then use computers to help us analyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together. -- Tim Berners-Lee

tuning in to Lev Manovich's lecture/discussion at V2. last time I saw Lev was at my flat in Helsinki in 2000, I made dinner for him, Tapio, and Susanna. His topic is "scale effects." Stephen Kovats, a curator at V2, sent an email invitation to myself and a handful of other folks who frequently participate in such live/online events. it is a non-standard way to participate, for sure, watching and hearing the event via an audio/video stream, and reacting to that via an IRC channel that is projected into the lecture space. there is much more that one could do to push this format for live interaction, but it usually ends up being rather mundane and polite.

sotto voce: after self data-mining. computers scaling social forms. (dialectic between increasing quantity, size, creates new effects. examples Wikipedia. scaling in visual culture. one million hours of programming online. (BBC?) company in San Diego makes 6 giga-pixel images. (factors -- image size, data volume, podcasting, moblogs) Bruce Sterling, the future. ubiquitous computing. media ecology. listing newest, hippest pop technologies. What about the societies in which this technological consumerism takes place in? medical imaging - PET, MRI, CT. graphical browsers took off. 30-40 years of media history. What about the impact of scaling up of existing media? What is tradition of quantitative effect scaling. very much based on a cartesian system. Mcluhan's suggestion that increasing of speed changes the social system. With scale being a parameter for comparison of media implementations. Speed: processing speed relating to visual presentation. algorithm already developed in Durer's time. so, scaling causes the development of a "whole new media"... new visualizations important to contemporary science. resolution yardstick. but the available visual cortex (field of vision) can cover a small fragment of the image at any one time. redefining new media. normal media flattens the world, then ssurveillance. 4k digital Cinema. adam says it's all smoke and mirrors. I think it seems to be using conventional metrics -- based in Cartesian worldviews? temporal, spatial, compression. the collective. "as much data as we want."

the irc discussion parallel leaves much space for wondering at Lev's success. there seems a close linkage between text production and influence, something I have mentioned many times in other places. he made careful note that he is working on two new books and is proceeding at a rate of 2500 words a day. seems linear, quantitative, and retro. hmmmm.

november comes already. a week shy of 4 months in rehabilitation. there are still many problems in the body. lying on the couch reaps intense stiffness and pain when getting up. belly distended, stretching some muscles, and others don't knit back together. discouraging. the exercise regimen is rewarding in that the body doesn't hurt so much afterwards, but during, it is a struggle. keep thinking that progress is made, but then there is so much yet to recapture. watching the chickens and ducks. there is a lame duck, bottom of the hierarchy except for the young hen hatched from an egg a couple months back. Giant Jeffrey, the Bantam cock, is at the top, by virtue of size, formidable spurs and talons, and aggressiveness. then come the hens, ranked by size. then the ducks, at the top there is the brown one. only when I throw locusts into the pen, large and juicy, will the young hen fight the ducks for it, chasing whoever gets it, even one of the large hens. Janet fed the young hen insects early on, and after awhile it would go beserk when you tossed a moth, cricket, or damselfly into her cage. so now, she is very focused on insects, more so than the other birds. I separated the two feeding troughs -- when they were together in one location, the cock and hens would not let anyone else near. this way it complicates their hegemonic attempts. also occasionally put the chickens out into the large corral, and leave the ducks in the small space with the food. and everytime I see the white duck, with a game leg hobbling around, I can't help but think "Dubbyah."

can true democracy coexist with hierarchies of power?

Loki discovers photoshop and skypes this effort to me. scary!