Kant has written a treatise on _The Vital Powers_; but I should like to
write a dirge on them, since their lavish use in the form of knocking,
hammering, and tumbling things about has made the whole of my life a
daily torment. Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will
smile at this, because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely
these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought,
poetry or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact
to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain
tissues.
On noise
Bots, bots, bots
(nothing else than bots)
The myth of transmutation
The Influencers,
one of the most exciting art festival in Europe nowadays, started
yesterday: James Acord’s, the world’s first nuclear sculptor, told the
story of the years he spent learning how to execute the most modern
alchemy, the conversion of radioactive waste into inert material and
subsequently into sculptures. Acord, the only person in the world
licensed to work with radioactive material, through his 20 years long
research digs into the hypocrisy of the nuclear era, whose policies,
developed in war ages, are dipped into secrecy. The idea of transmutation
goes back to its mythical root, that of the alchemic prodigious of the
conversion of an element into another element. The idea that matter is
interchangeable is still of incredible appeal, triggering actions and
reactions. The sculptor made, among others, an interesting reflection
around nuclear cemeteries and all those contaminated places where there
should be non-verbal signs of danger to be universally
understandable for centuries: here is a struggle it is predictable that
the symbolism of danger will change in human culture so how to create a
sculpture which serve its purpose long enough?
– written in Barcelona –
Viral Monster
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.
