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.
What is this implying exactly, I don’t know (yet): if metadata becomes ‘data’, and if this ‘body’ of information loses its reference, where soul and body become symbol of each other, but they never meet again, then, starting from the ‘song’ and the ‘shape’ of the monster, and from its suggestions, can we re-imagine digital world as new? If one day only souls will be left, so that only descriptions and metadata remain, the entire content of the internet, and the whole digital world, would become a shadow, and, like an ancient inscription, its real form will effectively become a matter of imagination.
http://virtualentity.org/journal
[Milan, February 1st 2010]
