SQL

I am studying SQL, it is now 2009. In a few days the first coding
week will start! My head is all over the places, I am changing house,
moving stuff around. Thanks to the support of Jan van Eyck, Megabug
will come to help me in Kanne, the new home for Ubik and me. Here you
can see our development plan:


– data analysis (metadata fields)
– database structure
– pilot database pool

python application (command line) to make operations on the database
(Souls inserting, metadata management, genetic relations and
inheritance)
– debugging (code freeze)
– download-able package
– users community
– population of the database

It
will be a very intense working week. Before he comes, which means
tomorrow, I would like to state the final metadata field, and the
minimal pilot. Our first meeting will be about the ‘database
structure’. After that, we will start with the python application.

I am looking forward to some coding :)

-written in Amsterdam-

Execute

I tend to think of software as open source software, so that the source
of the software is basically text. But i might be wrong, there is
windows and .exe files, and .jar and more and more. What can I do with
them? Is software Polumetis like Ulysses? Is software
requiring metadata? The question whether considering software text or
not is becoming every minute more controversial in my mind.

Reflections around substances after Haip

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.

The war on Symbols

I used to think that humans understand symbols (in the sense of visual
representations) before and in a more instinctive and effective way
than they actually reach to comprehend their meaning. Teenagers embrace
style before politics. They choose the A inside a circle, or do they
choose anarchism? Do they like long hair and running to political
demonstrations, or are they really interested in the working classes
rights? This very superficial approach and argumentation I am drafting
here is just a simplistic way to depict a deeper intuition I have had
about intrinsic relations between images and the human entity, be this
entity intended as a complexity which includes spirit, brain and body
(and these are not to be interpreted as necessarily separated
‘properties’). How far can we go injecting ideas inside a picture? What
is a logo? I like the idea of structuring powerful relations between
simplicity and complexity, induction and deduction, intuition, and
argumentation.

-written in Milan- 

Día de los Muertos

This log is about a coincidence: the first Souls database was created
on November 2nd, one day after the day of the dead. Sounds like a
perfect timing for Souls’ collectors. A special date that occurred by
chance, a day charged of specific significance by different cultural
traditions. Voila’. The game has started!

-written in Milan-

The Sun and the Moon

First of all it is very important to admit that the claim ’personal
notes’ implies the delineation of a person, or an identity. As a
physical entity, writing this Journal which is a research diary, I
might want to introduce myself in the first log. A way to describe ‘me’
is setting up positive adjectives, another system is listing a series
of negation. I will identify myself following the second method. Since
I am not only
virtual, I differ from the entities I am describing in the course of
this research, because infact, although I can proliferate, there is no
copy to be identical to the original. There is, infact, no original,
neither an authentic version of the Self, my Self. Any minute I change
again, and there is no hope to arrest this metamorphosis. What helps me
recognizing who am I, along the process, are the characteristic marks
that in Semiotics are said, in layman words, rendering the sense of
things. This way, I apparently find myself in fragments, and throughout
these pieces, I recognize the properties which are constant within my
personal deforming id-entity. Piece after piece, I search my person in
this negation. A piece is standing for another piece off course, it is
presuming there is another piece to be matching. So I build an idea of
myself as a succession of absence, negation, fragmentation.

Virtual
Entities are, on the other side (I am referring here to the vast field
of mirror art, mirror science, and the genealogy of life, just that),
ready to be fragmented, to lose their identity, to create new entities,
to be something else. But they don’t exist only in fragments, like us,
wretched (?) humans. And they are not unique. Also, they can be the
same over time.

All this is just to admit that, although i have multiple identities, we, me, are… I am not a digital file. At least, that’s what i was told.

So
this is a story of a human, another Alice, an Alice watching the
digital world, encountering a different substance. And there will be a
lot of talking about substances here, and we all know from school that
substance has something to do with ontology, and ontology is a
philosophical word that many people would be afraid of using because of
the embarrassing possibility of making a non-sense, a mistake. Ontology
is about the essence of things, rather than about their manifestation.
It is somehow related to language, because language is everywhere, and
because we experience and understand essence through language.

The Sun and the Moon…

I
(me.. oh me!) am currently splitting my self, my time, and my own brain
between two far away projects. I tend to think about them as two
separated domains, two Outer worlds, and I tactically separated the
framework of each in two different countries. If one is about humans
making decisions, and relations within the Self(ish) inhabitants of
post-industrial decadent urban conglomerates, the other is not focusing
on humans at all, and is considering language as an interface to let
them (these humans) be a bit more machine understandable. If one is
about society, and this society is describing itself in Alien colors,
the other project is about a post social-communism of immaterial
creations, but without any mean to control from above either the
creations or the creators, nor to transform any of them into commodity.
Although one project is about alienation, the alien is the symbol of
the other, where alienity, alientity, alien entities are finally acting
as the creatures they are.

But this is not the only cross over.
During very deep, almost ecstatic sessions of concentration and study,
I can foresee there is a common point between the Sun and the Moon, I
see there can be commutation between the two projects I am giving my
life for. I am not there yet, this is intuition, there is not a clear
explanation of such logic at this moment in time.

I can think of
Oracles talking to Entities, maybe, but this is rather puerile. There
is more behind this readers digest, and i can already see the point of
non-return, the point for me, oscillating on the abyss of pure theory,
completely excited. I will jump, yes, I jumped!

In short, the sun and the moon can commute (did you know that?).

((And, off course, i am not referring to the well known argument you cannot fart without changing the balance of the Universe.))

-written in Amsterdam-