UNIVERSE-CITY

Education is changing drastically and we all know that. There are two levels of this change, but both of the levels could completely re-route the other. The first level is the privatization of public schooling, the increase and planned build up of debt situations. The second is the internet and the DIY movement which comes from the inspiring structure of our internet.

WHAT IS SCHOOL?

Obviously, our information is everywhere. It is accessible to those who seek it. Proof of skills can be accurate even without a diploma. There are hacker laboratories and libraries and studios.  So what is school when you subtract the information and even (although this does get tricky) the physical resources.

What you have left is the "teaching" part, and the "teaching" part is more importantly, a social structuring. One which we should have adopted culturally outside of institutions long ago. Yes, we should be teaching each other at all times, learning from eachother at all times. Exchanging what we know, how we think, what our ideas are.

We need to grow with other people, otherwise we cannot relate to them in any deep way, even if they share similar interests, brain chemistry, read the same websites, work on the same things.
The fact is that what the university provides is an imposed social structuring which either has conditioned us to want it, or which is some-how a very necessary part of learning and growing as a human being.


To whom am i in debt for being able to have lived in a scenario where thinking and exploring the world of thinking is made economically sustainable. TO whom should i be in debt for for being allowed to grow with others growing.

Ok so, my point here is, how is it possible at all that this relationship between the state and "given space to think with others" turned into a relationship at all when we know very well that information, thoughts and people with skills are everywhere. As in,  space for learning and credibility simply is a natural occurence onto which strange imbalances hierarchies have been placed.


Now I am in a situation where my ideas are made in very threatening things, that one idea should be paid for over another is very confusing and an abrupt disconnecting of the fluidity of experimentation and learning by doing and of getting feedback and iterative "design" as they say.

WHAT LEFT IS SHAPE 

        Faced with the articulation of such a vast self-embedded immersive concept I  have to start somewhere. Let us start with the word "magnanimous." The word calls to mind an ever increasing magnitude and the thought of animation or rays of light. Magnification, and animus; life, magnified life. Well, that is sort of the meaning. What strikes me about this word is the Noah Webster Dictionary of American Language's definition of it.  

MAGNANIMITY, n. [L. magnanimitas; magnus, great, and animus, mind.]  that elevation or dignity of soul, which............prompts him to sacrifice personal ease, interest and safety for the accomplishment of useful and noble objects.[2]> 

Echo: for "the accomplishment of useful and noble objects." What are Noble Objects? Why do we love and create them as well as creating the tools to make them? Do buildings count as "noble objects"? Is a video a noble object? 

For humans objects are far more than objects. Objects are symbols. Objects are like the suffixs of a language. The english language often has trouble grappling with "things" the "stuff" of the world, "matter" "material" "reality" and even "life" without immediately falling back on terms that assess this "stuff" as "things".   For example, we have three pronouns for gender. He, she and IT.  It seems that anything not defined, outside of a binary or unknown, is reverted to being defined by an object word. This is very evident in astronomy, Unidentified Flying Object, and other acronyms which end in "Object."  The word object concretizing and unifying into a set whatever field of unknown-ness.  

They are even spiritual entities. As made very clear by Brenna Murphy's work. She calls her 3D creations "entities." We create them, whether in Design, Art, or even Architecture because they take on a life, they are a magnification of life. And yet they are lifeless? How can a human give an object such a life? Are humans that psychotic? Are we projecting some element of ourselves?

In a way yes, however the situation makes sense. In the process of objectifying our own bodies we find ourselves at a confusing break. Where does the line between life and object, is my body something I own? Do I have a body or am i my body? Where is my identity within, on the surface of or hovering around this body? This colonized symbol? Is the soul located in the neck, or spinal chord; where the nerve ending's between mind and body meat? (meet) 

 (below from wikipedia) 

"C. S. Lewis, in his book The Abolition of Man, refers to the chest of man as the seat of magnanimity, or sentiment, with this magnanimity working as the liaison between visceral and cerebral man.[6] Lewis asserts that in his time, the denial of the emotions that are found in the eternal, the sublime, that which is humbling as an objective reality, had led to "men without chests"."

In the web and intricacies of these kinds of questions it is evident that by experiencing "the life of an object" which is to say, experiencing an object as a an "entity" or "symbol" the projection of aesthetic or meaning onto an object we are enacting the need to understand ourselves as both material and mind. 

Although Object-relations psychologists like Melanie Klein have other theories, the tipping point from my perspective is this obsession among contemporary artists with 3Dimensional simulated space and the spiritual as well as an ever increasing use of model simulations in many fields of the sciences.

 3D virtual space also offers a us a new object-relationship dynamics. By creating a virtual object which is both an "object" and an ethereal "entity" we are doing something which is possible a deep reaction to the process of "objectification" which has occurred over time via capitalism. What a virtual object offers to it creators and viewers is an object which is re-endowed with spirituality or a kind of majestic other-worldliness. When we return this kind of spirituality we are giving these objects subjectivity in  a way. We are re-subjectifying things.  Typically in 3D software, you are also not only engaging with an object but also with it's environment; you set up a "scene", with lighting and set up a texture and a topology of the object determining how much this object takes in its environment or not. You create the visual "feeling" of an imagined "touch. 

Many people have questioned virtual reality and its potentially terrible impact on culture at large, it's contribution to extreme disembodiment. But I don't think it has to be this way. Although I only have small ideas about the kinds of set ups that would change this.

Somehow this disembodiment is, to me, an important phase in our transforming of how we think of space and being. Perhaps we need this dis-embodiment to be able to reconstruct what "space" means to our bodies. We must re-iterate over and over that, playing around as a different body in virtual reality or online in cyber space does in no way eliminate the identity-politics of being a body in the real world. But by increasing this distance between identity and body there is a potential to offer a third space in which we are manifesting ourselves still as spacial bodies, still as subjects within our bodies, but through the mind as a vessel not the other way around. This switch is very very important.

Numbers are space/Spacialized mathematics

I am very impressed by this image. Especially E. and F. and G.


One upon a time I was trying to understand computers.  I was thinking about how the Graphical User interface is an interface to code and then how code is ultimately an interface to binary numbers. Today I found this image while looking for charts of binary numbers in comparison to "normal" numbers.

I was thinking about how crazy binary numbers are, that they exist extra. And also how amazing code is, and how code isn't quite mathematics, its also a "language" a grammar, a syntax, a structure in a way.  I was thinking about how the Graphical User interface is an interface to code and then how code is ultimately an interface to binary numbers. But then math is a language too also.   But also what I see in it is that one is doing math with space.  And the body is a reliable tool for interfacing purely with space. So I guess the question is still in practice what happens when you count with body and also is it possible to actually to understand a system by just interfacing with space/its shape?

....

NEXT PLEASE

"Future Primitives"= "Present Primitives" with technology

Is the trans-localization cellS of the internet a return to early human nomadism?? A virtual nomadism where we "hunt" and "gather" information! culture! ideas! and trade material resources!
Yes.

What happens to physical space when ALL our trade routes are monopolized in one virtual world?  What will we do with it all?
All that space. All that empty space.
(But i still have  cytokines..)

And the use of symbols and icons in our touch screens, desktops, and even for materials in the sense of corporate symbols, is this the reusing of glyphs ,character-based languages which are pictographic/logographic.
                     

When and how are we going to push language over its next little ledge. We have changed the nature of how we use language. But when we will change the way language is enacted. We have extensions of the written form but not yet the vocal chords.

"BODY JAMMING"

Here's what I propose for our organizational navigating of WHAT ARE WE DOING?

So, you've heard of culture jamming?
No? CULTURE JAMMING

BODY JAMMING is the same thing, only instead of our consumer culture, we attack/hack of body/self divide, which is in many cases, the result of media/ consumer cultural being integrated cognitively and physically in an unbalanced way. Body-jamming might be an intentional hacking, but also may be a larger part of the pursuit of extending awareness of disembodiment, where and why it happens, what exactly is happening and exploring the question of how much control we have over it.

This means hacking into how you perceive your body to be, kind of life phantom

limbs. This is still very broad, but this can be spacial- your body in space (feeling large or small) known as macroscopy and microscopy.
It could be auditory, changes in audio has huge effects on perception of illness, and often even involuntary functions.


hypochondria, anorexia, muscular dystrophy, are are kind of examples of psychological diseases related to body jamming.

A similar branch off of this would be BIO-Jamming, otherwise known biopunk/ DIYBio/ biohacking... But that is a different genre which could be partially integrated into this one as well.


There are many POTENTIAL EXAMPLES OF BODY JAMMING:
vitamin pills

here is a the sketch up model: You may add to it as well! PLEASE SEND! body-jamming graph model

Speech Jammer!

here is a the sketch up model: You may add to it as well! PLEASE SEND! body-jamming graph model

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA2g6bTvE-A&feature=colike