That sounds right, but is it simply a description of how to be successful in general? I don’t think so. This isn’t the recipe for success in writing or painting, for example. In that kind of work the recipe is more to be actively curious. Resourceful implies the obstacles are external, which they generally are in startups. But in writing and painting they’re mostly internal; the obstacle is your own obtuseness.
we wouldn’t have a whole lot of fun nor learn anything useful if we knew what we were doing.
The whole reactive mind can be in fact reduced to three little words – to be “the“. That is to be what you are not, verbal formulations.
And what then is the written word? My basic theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host… (This symbiotic relationship is now breaking down for reasons I will suggest later.)
I’m trying to weave a number of threads together to see what sort of tapestry appears; one can play without understanding any of the following references; indeed it might be preferable to proceed in that fashion. But for those who need more structure I offer the following (there’s a lot of links and therefore information here, even if you don’t click on anything in the Wikipedia articles; feel free to skip around):
while I didn’t start there, it turns out that this project finds its foundations in Alfred Korzybski’s work on General Semantics. In other words, it’s about words. How the word, or what Marshall McLuhan called A-B-C-D mindedness, shapeo our thinking and behavior; and how the Web might/does act as a pharmakon.
an underlying premise is that the World Wide Web and particularly recent developments such as twtter, and seesmic, function in the manner of the traditional surrealist methodology, which was further developed and applied to electronic media by William Burroughs. The cut up has been redefined as social bookmarking, and citizen journalism.
the real subject of this project, insofar as there is one, being identity. most of the current metaphors for the Web are spatial; Whitman’s body electric sings us all.
The is of identity. You are an animal. You are a body. Now whatever you may be you are not an “animal,” you are not a “body,” because these are verbal labels. The is of identity always carries the assignment of permanent condition. To stay that way. All name calling presupposes the is of identity.
The aim of this project is to build up a language in which certain falsifications inherent in all existing western languages will be made incapable of formulation.
This concept is unnecessary in a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian and in fact frequently omitted. No need to say the sun is in the sky, sun in sky suffices. The verb to be can easily be omitted from any languages and the followers of Count Korzybski have done this, eliminating the verb to be in English. However, it is difficult to tidy up the English language by arbitrary exclusion of concepts which remain in force so long as the unchanged language is spoken.
The definite article the. The contains the implication of one and only: The God, The universe, The way, The right, The wrong, If there is another, then That universe, That way is no longer The universe, The way. The definite article The will be deleted and the indefinite article A will take its place.
The whole concept of Either/Or. Right or wrong, physical or mental, true or false, the whole concept of or will be deleted from the language and replaced by juxtaposition, by and. This is done to some extent in any pictorial language where two concepts stand literally side by side. These falsifications inherent in the English and other western alphabetical languages give the reactive mind commands their overwhelming force in these languages.
the idea is to publish the interaction of three (?) individuals who share at least one common factor, that they know Don, and to let each of these individuals introduce one other participant into the mix. other than that, we just watch what happens.
I should note that all the block quotes in this article are from William Burroughs. I don’t know that this explains much, but it’s pretty interesting nonetheless. let’s move on to tools; this is not meant to be an exhaustive list but rather a starting point; these are the tools that started me thinking about this project. I’m open to additions and other suggestions, but here’s the minimal starting point:
seesmic; again everyone will need an account. if you’re not familiar with it, seesmic is a video blogging/conversation application.
a WebCam
beta version of twhirl; you can get it here but you’ll have to sign up for the beta; this isn’t absolutely necessary but it will make integration and cross posting much simpler. if you go this route will you will also need to install Adobe Air. the final piece is a ping.FM account, which will allow you to tie into all your other favorite social networking haunts with a single send.
video is the prime information carrier for this project but remember, “Playback is the essential ingredient.”
The basic operation of recording pictures, more pictures and playback can be carried out by anyone with a recorder and a camera. Any number can play. Millions of people could nullify the control system which those who are behind Watergate and Nixon are attempting to impose. Like all control systems it depends on maintaining a monopoly position. If anybody can be tape recorder 3 then tape recorder 3 loses power. God must be The God.
the careful reader will have noticed the absence of the word game despite the invitation to play . there’s a simple reason when we think game we think about winning and losing and the next thing you know you have the whole Middle East situation; were looking for something better…
That is what this revolution is about. End of game. New games? There are no new games from here to eternity.
I’ve been experimenting with twinkling thwirl and sweet sounding seesmic and that naturally, given my current reading, led me to thinking about William Burroughs and the Electronic Revolution. So, I’m looking for some folks who are interested in experimenting with asynchronous conversation. I don’t have any rules as yet, but the research set up looks something like this. I will identify three friends who do not know each other but only know me. Each of them will identify at least one friend who knows none of the other participants. Using twirl, twitter, and seesmic we will begin a series of public discourses with online video as the primary carrier. Exactly who talks to whom, and how these conversations get cut up, is yet to be worked out, but we will take the Burroughs text as a starting point.
Just because I haven’t been posting doesn’t mean I haven’t been working, thinking, researching, that sort of thing. Martin Heidegger suggested that we knew there was such a thing as art because we could find things which we recognized as art works. A kind of circular logic that was hard to argue with and tended to make your head hurt, particularly when you had to start defining things like thing before you could really get going. I believe we’ve progressed some, as we now know that there is such a thing as art because there are things made by people called artists. Heidegger touches on this, but it was early and he couldn’t really imagine where things were headed.
I just discovered a new website called Smarthistory which brings all this into focus. If you follow this link you can hear two obviously knowledgeable people enthusing about “Untitled” by Eva Hesse; there’s also a picture which will bring context to their discussion. The problem I have is that if this particular Untitled been made by someone other than a real artist, you or I for instance, and it hadn’t been framed by a museum none of this would make much sense. (I don’t mean that the museum actually framed this, that would obviously missed large part of the conceptual point, but rather that the museum itself acts as a frame which makes the discourse possible.) I mean Untitled is nice enough, but then as Marcel Duchamp noticed so are a lot of things.
It’s a new year, even if I’m a bit tardy in recognizing that fact, and I’m going to be taking some new directions. In part that means simplifying my web presence to two main sites. Learning Aesthetics will be primarily day job-related; learning technology, higher education, and the like. SightWork be a combination of things that I make, and things that I like.
I haven’t figured out of style or voice, so you can expect a bit of exploration, which is a polite way of saying stumbling about. In fact one of the reasons I’m so far into the new year is that I haven’t figured out how to explain starting, what I’m doing, what to do. Perhaps some visual aids will help. For quite a while I have been calling myself a photographer, and for the past few years: the work product drawings. This because the images have tended to start out as snapshots and then most of the work has been done in Photoshop. Actually the line between Photoshop and photography has grown increasingly blurry for everyone; as has the line between the real and the ideal. There’s room for a lengthy digression on the relationship between retouching and reality, but I think I’ll save that for later. Also for later some of my thoughts about what counts as art, or maybe the relationship between art and beauty, or art and the sublime. But I was leading up to visual aids. I’m now working in Corel painter, which is sort of like a ghetto branch of digital image manipulation. I just started and Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes about 10,000 hours to get good at something; that’s about four hours a day for 10 years, something like that. This is almost as daunting as putting something up on the Internet in the face of everything that’s already there, or as the Flatlanders put it, “…a lot of those boys make a lot more music than I can.” But who knows 10,000 hours from now I may have figured something out.
You will I hope forgive me if I Post obsessively on the same topic. It’s my way of fighting the depression I feel that the current situation. Here’s a link to the Daily Dish that nicely sums up everything that I’m thinking about John McCain and his campaign.
