xname

(nothing else than bots)

When I think of Virtual Entity as a science fiction project, I imagine a sort of noisy humus, or blinking plancton, as if matter - that is immaterial matter, or information - would redistribute itself continuously, and shiny bonds would connect particles of fragmented pieces of predigested elements, forming the body of that monster whose unstable structure is made of textual souls, and of the space around them. Virtual Entity is, indeed, the formation of such processes of instantiation, and of the linking of those uber-structures that are above the file-body. If this is deeply connected to the mythical approach to this subject - the myth of digital birth and digital creation, isn’t it anyhow hard to deny that a creature, whose body is entirely made of pointers (to bodies which are not present), is a monstrous creature?
Thus, jumping out of this dreamy dimension, it is necessary to admit that the so called ‘viral archive’, the horizontal and uncontrollable one, is, indeed, peculiar. First of all, this information, as I said in advance, is not necessarily true, nor scientific or systematic; second, since we are talking about an archive of metadata, and considering the fact this database is not storing any copy of any file, because the software creates an online soul from a local file, then the mythical monster, and the viral archive (which are the same thing), are a meta-archive and a pseudo-monster, a monster without soul whose body is a collection of souls, and an archive of information which talks about information that is not present.

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Can you please... git me?

All this clever people think: git is just another tool for coders.
No way, this is a sign in the development of human thought.  This is revolution, but not many understood.
How many things can you just git? How many years have you been using silicium-back-ups? How many hours did you spend around a single, blessed 'comma'? "Is this perfect Italian? Is this good English?" What do I mean exactly? What are symbols and signs implying? How many minutes, instants, seconds can be spent deciding: what error do I want to remember, erase, record? What should I delete, preserve, forget?

Git is an important achievement in literature, aha. 

(Linus Torvalds is laughing, in the background!)

In a remote corner of the universe flickering with countless solar systems, there was once a star where clever animals invented knowledge. It was the proudest and most deceitful moment in world history; but it was only a moment. After Nature had taken a few breaths, the star froze, and the clever animals had to die.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: 1873.

"*If all of them are right, and if all pills are only Pink, let's try for once not to be right. * People think they can explain rationally, by means of thought, what they write. But it's very relative. Thought is a fine thing for philosophy, but it's relative. Psychoanalysis is a dangerous disease, it deadens man's anti-real inclinations and systematises the bourgeoisie. There is no ultimate Truth."

"Dialectics is an amusing machine that leads us (in banal fashion) to the opinions which we would have held in any case. Do people really think that, by the meticulous subtlety of logic, they have demonstrated the truth and established the accuracy of their opinions? Even if logic were confined by the senses it would still be an organic disease."

Tristan Tzara, 1918.

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Warm-up event for AHAcktitude: lecture + workshop at Brera Fine Art Academy, Milan, october 26th 12:00 - 18:00 (Aula 210. Viale Marche 71).

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The entire structure of the Virtual Entity project, and the entire structure of the digital world, and the whole system of oppositions, and the fancy PhD?-bubble, the entire whole world seems to be talking about a (fantastic) dualistic composition, that of this and that, as in Practice and Theory, or Software and Philosophy, or Content and Form, Junction and Dis-junction, including the semiotic attempt to learn from the process of connecting the act of making sense in itself to the symbol as a pre-determined array of strata -out of humanity. Following this ancestral structure, that of the zeros and ones which we nowadays find incredibly fulfilling - as if confusing an alphabet with the spell - this research on virtual life and immaterial consciousness, this quest on digital filaments and the naturality of manufactures, all that, which I named Virtual Entity, was nailed and confined to a narrow vision, that of a software developing itself silently, and compulsively, while a totally separated theory talks, phantasmatically walking on another sphere. Yet it was never the case: the development was in fact a continuous dialog between the two sides, a rhythmic triggering of doubts, questions and answers transduced from one vertex to the other. So how to declare definitely obsolete any distinction, entangling these two dimensions in such a way that, not differently from the Cartesian representation of x and y on a planar schema, this theoretical software can unfold its entire, 3dimensional constitution?
How do we wander through the marvellous garden of executable logic, if not singing a requiem* for human culture?

(Please read carefully the upcoming releases…)

• requiem: musical service, hymn, or dirge for the repose of the soul of the dead.

-written in Athens-