Saturday, April 28, 2012

Thickness of Avatars


Sat Apr 28 13:44:23 EDT 2012
The Moon is Waxing Crescent (43% of Full)
remove '/net/u/6/s/sondheim/.procmail/log'? y
k1% more yy
I keep thinking about the THICKNESS of avatars and their LACK THEREOF
since there's nothing there but faces that give the appearance of
solidity. If you cut open a HUMAN BEING or other organism, you get
solid/liquid/gas, something or other, all the way down or in; if you go
inside an AVATAR as such, you see nothing since most likely the faces just
face one direction - outward.

So a big difference is that when you cut open a real physical organism,
you create NEW FACES, since FACES could be defined by WHAT'S VISIBLE. So
there are FACES ALL THE WAY DOWN.

Does this matter? Probably not, but I think of edibility, what one might
eat, and that seems to apply to the latter but not the former. YOU CAN'T
EAT A SINGLE FACE THAT FACES JUST ONE DIRECTION OR EVEN A SINGLE FACE THAT
FACES TWO DIRECTIONS since faces are sections of two-dimensional space
embedded in three-dimensional space, where they NECESSARILY HAVE ZERO
VOLUME.

Eating and gathering energy in THIS UNIVERSE always implies at least
THREE-DIMENSIONAL VOLUME, if not more. So what I'm wonderig - is what
could we possibly mean by THE THICKNESS OF AVATARS or THE EDIBILITY OF
AVATARS, and these are not minor questions or irritations but really
FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE ALIVE IN THIS UNIVERSE, where
we gather energy, devour things, expel other things, transform things -

Anyway back to the EDIBILITY OR THICKNESS OF AVATARS - so important
because without this, they're at best PROJECTIONS OR REPRESENTATIONS OF
SOMETHING ELSE, and we can't have that.

So AVATARS ARE ANORECTIC, they DISHUNGER towards anorexia, they remain at
zero-thinness or do they?

So the question is: WHAT COULD WE MEAN BY THE THICKNESS OF AVATARS, OR THE
EDIBILITY OF AVATARS, IF ANYTHING?

AND CAN WE GIVE EXAMPLES?

AND ARE THESE EXAMPLES - OUR VERY FUTURE, WHICH IS AT STAKE?

5 comments:

  1. What's visible? Are there faces all the way down? Do avatars remain at zero-thinness? Here are some examples of my first forays (made 3 years ago) into the thickness of my avatars (my attempts at or expressions of desire for embodiment) in a particular world, the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX world:
    rawLorem Ipsum - http://www.runran.net/remix_runran/?p=696
    biogenoscopic translocation - http://www.runran.net/remix_runran/?p=1478
    Dishunger! The idea is haunting me. My innards are mysterious to me. I'm feeding on the connections. More to come soon...

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  2. Hi Christine, can you say more about the R3... world? Would really appreciate it. The thickness here of course is illusory; each level is a slice at roughly a millimeter (I think?) from the Visible Human Project? - do I have this right? So there are these gaps, x,y,z, that are regular, adjusted, lined up and as in Las Vegas, what happens on one layer stays in that layer. Think a vein for example in the z direction by which I mean between layers, say layer n+m and n+m+1 - there's no connectivity there, nothing passes, an illusion maybe paralleling was it Eddington in the 20s who went on about a table being mainly empty space and the "scientist's table" was different from the table we use? But then the "scientist's table" was different from the Visible Human Project as well since there was molecular glue / forces holding the thing together, the table couldn't be disassembled layer by layer without one layer effecting another; if you cut it it millimeter by millimeter, it wouldn't reassemble the same way, too much damage. Think of cutting the human like that - not the photographed human, but the corpse or rather the human, living; those connections would be permanently broken, the thing would die.

    I used to FLY through the Visible Human Project, you could do that with the Time/Life I think cdrom years and years ago then it wouldn't work on more modern machines.

    The body lived on the cdrom or in databases.

    There's nothing between 0 and 1 in the bases, or rather nothing between one digital state and another, no sloughing there.

    The thickness is illusory. Maybe desire for embodiment has to work on the brain of the one who desires and the brain of the one who is desired and the rest is just transitive, transitive terminology - I remember Irigaray talking about the male view of women as x-ed out within the world of men, so it would be man (woman) man, the woman the transitive term at best. But maybe it wasn't Irigaray. In any case the transitive term is the avatar, the digital bubble of an organism.

    Your work is beautiful. We need to be able to have others paste here - do you know how to make a blog multiple?

    Thanks, Alan

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  3. Yes, my 'avatars' were (re)animated from the Visible Human Viewer, which used to be at www.adelaide.edu.au but doesn't seem to be there anymore.

    From 'about' on our 'R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX - selected works' page:

    "R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX (remixworx) is a space for the remixing of digital media, including visual poetry (vispo), electronic poetry (flashpo), playable media, animation, music, spoken word, texts and more. It began as a blog in November 2006 and has grown to number over 500 individual works of media. The source material is made available and all media is freely given to be remixed. Each new work is remixed, literally or conceptually, from other works on the blog. Then, the new work is linked to the blog post(s) that contain the component parts, thus the blog 'talks to itself'..."

    I've been involved in remixworx since January 2007. I find the process of remixing an intimate experience where I'm projecting something of myself - perhaps layers of myself - into the remix, inserting layers of digital media, words and code, between other remixers' layers of... well, not just digital media or code but ideas too. I felt it necessary, or it felt 'natural', to fashion something akin to an avatar to be... what? something shifting, slipping in and out of existence, sliding between the layers, being a remixable layer of me, perhaps, a skin I can shed and grow again, and again...

    I'm called away... more soon...

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  4. Forgot the link - R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX - selected works http://www.runran.net/remixworx/

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  5. http://www.runran.net/remixworx/ - is absolutely wonderful! I see what you're talking about of course. I did some work with my own images a while ago using Visual Basic - they're at http://www.alansondheim.org/exe/ and might not work on Macs. They're less mix and more noise/process added that also deals with issues of control - related to jodi.org.

    I'll be on later - thanks -

    ReplyDelete