[syndicate] Title - Phenomenology of the Real (upcoming talk at WVU BIOS conference) (fwd)

[Alan Sondheim]

Title - Phenomenology of the Real (upcoming talk at WVU BIOS conference)


The eye isn't like a camera. It scans, simultaneously receives and
constructs.

The eye tends towards interesting things, movement or anomaly.

Scanning creates the choices and the Pale.

Scanning creates the authentic and problematic.

Scanning is an active process in the world, constructing worlds.

Scanning implies bandwidth, implies negation: scan(x) and (x)(-x).

Let us think for a moment about the edge of scan, about the infinite real
or analog, about for example a theoretical motion capture device with a
complete description of forearm skin during the average step of the
average walk.

Clearly one needs an infinite number of sensors; clearly the data becomes
equivalent to the real with an ontological shift; clearly an infinite
amount of energy is necessary; clearly this is impossible.

Scan implies choice; I say, my raster is sufficient in this instance -
meaning, I can divide this object or even clearly and cleanly in such a
manner that nothing of importance is left out.

Now I, perturbed, scan the perturbed body, perturb software; what may be
for example flesh becomes file becomes image, and such an image that it is
suitable for your eyes only, for this species within the sign of eternity.

And I inject these images into the imaginary of both body and perception -
that is, within the perceiving and receptive body - a body internally
folded in a manner recalling Riemannian geometry - a body conceived as a
multiply-connected manifold of tensions and distortions.

This is the multiply-vibrating body, the body internally connected in such
a manner as can only be the result of external connectivity; otherwise, as
Kant might have it, the world may split apart.

Such a body ingests time.

It takes no time to ingest time; time disposes, indisposes.

Every line is after every other.

Imagine: An Access Grid moment: I send my body-image across the earth.
A shot is fired.
I am dead but read you reading me alive.
I will not die on the Access Grid.

A multiple-exposure photograph becomes a totalization, indecipherable; a
multiple-exposure scan becomes stitched, recuperable, archaeological.

I assert it is the body that is traveling on the Access Grid, it is the
body that speaks to another body in online gaming or MOOs, it is the body
that participates in a true, real economy, online and off, it is the sexed
body that is scented online and off: For one, therefore the other; for the
other, therefore the one.

Let us never forget that other economics of the feasible, of starvation-
extinction; there is there there. There are no scans there. There is
there.

There, is not present here. To understand its absence, one must understand
the absence of digital, absence of analog, absence of the figure-in-the-
landscape: perspective. There, is not even another question. There, is
future. the future of impresent. This does not travel the Access Grid;
this does not travel at all; in the future, we will not travel; in the
future, we will not learn.