During the presentation at Haip festival Virtual Entity’s digital world
division into four substances was put under question. Basically the
whole lecture was divided in two segments: from a general presentation
of the project and its current state, the focus went on substances as
relevant categories, including relative problems and possible solutions
to those. These four substances are, in the specific, Text, Audio,
Video, and Image. These are somewhat echoing Aristotle’s four elements
constituting earth, and the celestial globe.
An interesting discussion started, here is a recording of the stream in mp3 or ogg.
Some people argued that text is nothing else than a sub category of
image, because in fact any letter is a symbol, an a symbol is for sure
an image. Others declared anything to be open with vi (nerd text
editor, lovely application) is text. The problem of steganography came
about as an example of ambiguity. If I inject text data inside an
image, what is the substance of such image? If an image is representing
a piece of text, lets say the name ‘xname’, is this an image or a text?
What is the Soul of such digital entity, that is to say the picture of
a name? And further, what about the Midi protocol? Isn’t this text to
describe sound? If the basic distinction between ‘natural born analog’
and ‘natural born digital’ was commonly accepted, the ‘assembly’ stated
the following: "not every single file is to belong to a single
substance", although it is true that the entire digital world can be
described as audio, video, text, image. This division implies a certain
approach from the technical back-end that was basically triggering the
whole philosophical discussion, although this mean was not explicit for
the most. The problem is, shall we ignore the substances, while
building the first Souls’ pool, or shall we declare these substances as
concomitant possibilities? The right words to answer this question came
about tonight: all substances are immanent in Virtual
Entities. This is the basic conceptual achieve of my Haip experience
(other than this, I will not say). Thanks to all workshop’s
participants and many thanks to Megabug, who does not share my opinion
on not randomizing the approach to Metadata. The achievement, that was
collectively generated during an intense afternoon of a not yet cold
Autumn in the South East, appears at the end almost obvious: should an
immaterial entity have a single substance? Off course not. The
substance depends (especially in such cases) on the specific approach
to content, rather than on a supposed unique matter. More problems are
arising, and I decided there must be a limit to complexity to render
this project actual: theory can lead until a certain extent. The margin
where theory dissipates practice, and ideas become impossible to grasp,
and elusive, and fragile such as leaves under the wind of the same, now
cold, season, this step towards dispersion, we will not walk. And
Virtual Entity stays a practical project, without crossing the border
addressing the void, but developing of theory an actual demonstration,
or zoo.
