v _____ v  _____    _   _  v _____ v   ____      ____       _      ____
     \| ___"|/ |_ " _|  |'| |'| \| ___"|/v |  _"\ v v|  _"\ vv  /"\  v |  _"\
      |  _|"  V  | |   /| |_| |\ |  _|" R \| |_) |/ \| |_) |/ \/ _ \/ /| | | |
      | |___    /| |\  v|  A  |v | |___    |  _ <  I |  __/   / ___ \ v| |_| |\
      |_____|  v |_|v   |_| |_|  |_____|   |_| \_\   |_|    A/_/   \_\ |____/ v
       <<   >>  _// \\_  //   \\  <<   >>   //   \\_  ||>>_    \\    >>  |||_
       (_V_) (_A_)(_R_) (_I_)(_A_) ("_)(__) (__) (__)  (_P_)(_A_)_D_)  (__)  (__)

  Welcome to the etherpad-lite instance hosted by Varia! 
  You are most welcome to use it but please take note of the following things: 

  VISIBILITY:
  - The pads are not indexed by search engines, but anyone that knows its URL is welcome to read and edit it.

  PRIVACY: 
  - The contents of the pads are not encrypted, meaning that they are not private. 
  - Anyone with access to the server has the possibility to see the content of your pads. 

  RETENTION:
  - We make our own backups, meaning the the contents of all pads sit on our harddrives potentially indefinitely.
  - Because the identity of a pad author cannot be confirmed, we don't respond to pad retrieval requests.

  ACCESSIBILITY:
  - If you rely on the content of these pads, please remember to make your own backups.
  - The availability of the pads is subject to cosmic events, spilled drinks and personal energies.

  CODE OF CONDUCT:
  - Both the physical and digital spaces of Varia are subject to our Code of Conduct <https://varia.zone/en/pages/code-of-conduct.html>
  BE NOTIFIED OF CHANGES: 
  If you find that you, your organization or your projects rely on these pads and would be impacted from their unavailability, it is a good idea to subscribe to our infratructure mailinglist: https://we.lurk.org/mailman3/lists/infra-varia.we.lurk.org/

  If you wish to publish a pad to the Varia etherdump <https://etherdump.vvvvvvaria.org/> add the magic word __ PUBLISH __ (remove the spaces between the word and __) to your pad.

*･゜ﾟ･*:.｡..｡.:*･*:.｡. ☀️ Warming-up ☀️  *･*:.｡. .｡.:*･゜ﾟ･*

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pew pew picakse
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                                                                               sss                                 
___ wow this is just a laptop o_o _______...oh, I'm zoomed out! _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
aosenuthaosentuhaeosntuhsaoenuthneaodiadatoeuhntaheutoeahduntheoadunhtoeadunthaoedutnaeodhuntheoadunthaoedunthoadintuhisothdstuehisnotehiuseonthisuithu
ghvfgcdcgvhjkojhgfdxsfkolpkoijhugyftdrfhijkolp[;lpokijhugyftdrsedklp;[lp;gfdsxfghjklp;pkgfdxfcghjklp;;[pgfdfcgvhjklp;kjhgfdxfghyh
asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasfasdfasdfasdfasfsda
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                                      space                   space                    some of you have big screens
sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss:D

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fabi, he/him, distant murmur and the the 50/60 Hz noise/hum of my plugged in headphones, I am sitting the locker room of a old public swimmingpool, which is now a cultural space
Sissel, She/Her, the sounds of a cat munching on his lunch :D Very happy to be looking out at the sea, a large white cliff in the distance and sparkling sunshine (Newhaven UK)
Jjust annie, wind is blowing, rain faling, I won't see the ending of Paris-Nice on the Col de Turini today.
Lottie (She/her) I hear my neighbour scratching like a furry animal on the wall next door. This is a cute warm-up. At first I was disappointed we're not meeting in person, but now I really get it.
Jo, he/him, it is very quiet today. The laptop fan, my fingers on the keys, a breeze in the chimney, my breathing, a little pop as I tilt my head
Rhian, she/her lawnmower outside, 
Chris, He/Him, The blistering wind + traffic, and its great to play with AI with you all today!
Joana Chicau she/her, an airplane, wind birds. I like dancing Tango and other dances too.
Ahnjili, she/her, my laptop cooling down, I am very hungover right now but glad I can still join the workshop.
victor (he/him) cars running by outside, small high pitched noise of electronics, sounds of eating from the kitchen
amy (she/her) my bluetooth headphones are in my ears so sound is muffled. I hear the fan of my laptop close to my face
tacha (she/her), music streaming from the other room
rebekka (she/her) sunnysunnnyfirstspringdayspringnoisesitfeelsstrangetositinsidebuti'mexcitednonetheless...myleftearitchesbecauseoftheheadphones
chaim (jon) (hey/him) - it's really quiet here, and my headphones are on. I'm excited to read and annotate together, I'm an amateur poet and banjo player and I love Laurie Anderson :-) :) me tooSame lol




A wizard.
A young king lol.
bits and bobs discombubulating inserting never ending or beginning floating in ether
a ghost in the shell
a hive mind
I wonder what the difference is from just writing on my machine :)writing with your machine? rather that being written by your machine?
my old self again
we are all machines
permeable, attuned, confused
like we are more connected than we were before
swimming
the machine makes this possible, but I feel you!
de-centralising the self
Rumpelstiltskin
what are words? where are they coming from? where are they going? does it matter?
I may have difficulty setting good boundaries
a little addicted
we should do this all the time (it makes me feel relaxed in some strange way)
an explorer




Now we are going to think about
*    .  *      .        .  *   
  ..    *    .      *  .  ..  *
 *    *            .      *   *
.     *  Magic Words      *    
   .        .        .   *    .
 .      .        .            *
   .     *      *        *    .

Magic Words were brought into the software ecology of Etherpad by Michael Murtaugh, a member of the Brussels-based arts organisation Constant. Magic Words are used to enact certain commands; using __PUBLISH__ on this pad indexes it on this page: https://vvvvvvaria.org/etherpump/ (every hour, so at 13:00 it will be indexed)

We would like to think together about Magic Words as scores that invite for modes of re-reading, re-writing, voicing.
What kind of relations between text & reader, reader & reader, place & text, place & text & reader could the magic words provoke? If we see magic words like small instructions that can be activated during a collective reading experience, how would that affect our being together?

We will be adding, using and reusing new magic words during the reading time that will follow.

..   -    * Spellbook for Reading through Magic Words .  -  * .. 

Here are a few examples of what the magic words could look like. Think of them as launching a specific kind of interaction with the text fragment that it sits next to. This will be our collective spellbook that everyone can add, edit or use at will, even while reading the text. 
We will take some time now to add our own magic words to the list below.





__BREATH__ The reader should take a really deep breath when one encounters this 


___HOLDBREATH___ Hold your breath for as long as you can as you read

__RAP__ Spit some sick bars (out loud or in your head)

___SPREAD___ Spread your arms, legs, wings, and/or mind and spirit as you read



___SHUFFLE___ The reader is invited to read the phrase a few times, shuffling around the words, playing with whatever variations pop into their head. If you want, add in some variations.

___OPPOSITE___ The reader is invited to consider some kind of opposite or contrary to what is written. If you want, add it

___SING___the reader should sing this phrase


_READ THE VOIDS_

_WHO?_


___SEND___the reader should copy this text and message it to somebody outside the conversation 




Now we are going to do some experimentation with Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick's text Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You and Ursula K. Le Guin's writings; Oral Space and Oral Time, and Stress-Rhythm in Poetry and Prose, incorporating our magic words into all of them.

We will paste excerpts of these texts intermittently on the pad, we will remove our colours so it's easier to read, and so we can see better our annotations.
As we go through the text, we will use the magic words to annotate our thoughts, feelings, considerations and reactions to what we read.
We will read in whatever pace feels good for us, and follow some kind of collective rhythm on our way.

Ursula K. Le Guin, was an author best known for her works of science fiction and fantasy. The following text is from Oral Space and Oral Time .


Now we're going to read excerpts from the book/essayyes! as part of as part of the anthology Touching Feeling. Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, the essay; Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who worked in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, and critical theory.

We will repeat the reading and annotation exercise from just before.


We return to Ursula K. Le Guin, this time the essay Stress-Rhythm in Poetry and Prose:


We return to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's text:


Thank you for reading and magic wording!
The full essay(!) of Eve's is available here: https://hcommons.org/?get_group_doc=1003678/1629909863-sedgwick-1997-paranoid-reading-and-reparative-reading.pdf
Ursula K. Le Guin's words were from The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Which is hopefully available to you in pirate libraries if you would like to read more. Also here: https://cloud.vvvvvvaria.org/s/FkMdPedEXgsrb4w
this exercise below is for back on BBB

Exercise Voice #1: (inspired by ❤ Rebekka's) We will read out loud all texts together, without interruption. We will listen to our polyphony, our different paces, our different stresses, our interconnecting rhythms. You may include magic words and other annotations. We will start from the first text we 'Sound signifies event.' Remember to unmute on our BBB link (https://bbb.constantvzw.org/b/joa-kvv-com-gcp).



* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * [now we are having a short break] * * * * * * * * * * * * [we meet back in BBB in 10minutes! --> 15:30]

During this second part, Jon will introduce how to run the interactive Jupyter notebook in Google Colab. After that we come back to the pad for more reading and writing!

Reading & Annotating: 
    After generating our texts, we will copy them to the pad.
    You can format the text in which way you want (like a poem, essay, series of tweets..).
    Then we can annotate the algorithmically generated text with our Magic Words from before, or new ones.
    When we are done, we can read other text submissions in the pad. We can add our magic words to other peoples additions.
We hope to experiment, respectfully, with algorithmic co-authorship!

GENERATED TEXTS BELOW HERE :)

Writing with a machine makes me feel like ...  this __BLEACH__  (Tears fly, for nothing),
On one word my body cries and sings again [_SING_]; or the moon quaking more strongly to thunder for four;
With each eye for and looking backward—without thinking of ever

 11. The second one's feet are broken. 
 12. At the front, a long line of broken mirrors. 
 13. The people were waiting to get married, but were unable to make it. They had only one child. 
 14. Two girls were waiting for school. One lost the father when she grew up. 
 15. A boy was fighting. The children were too busy fighting to read, but they couldn't read. 
 16. After the men left, the women came back to get married. 
 17. Children were never seen again. 
 18. A white wall in the middle was used after the war. 
 19. A white wall was used after the war. 
 20. The house was too loud. 
 21. When there was no light at night, children lost a place to sleep. 
 22. The houses got torn down. 
 23. One of the children couldn't see. 
 24. Two of the children couldn't...__ELABORATE__escape

 Humans programmed to  ...  make these to avoid starvation:
11. __SING__ A mitten called a "fink-eye" could create a pumpkin. 
12. A bear had to eat a pumpkin. 
13. An egg can only make [_ELABORATE_]
15. The egg's body has a thick layer of fat to it. This fat allows the egg to take five and five. 
14. An owl had to starve to get three of his eggs. 
15. A teddy bear has to work a job every day to keep the baby from being crushed in the muck. It will make six in five days. It will also create three different baby teddy bears. 
16. A little girl is a baby mitten because she wants three teddy bears. It will make 10 in fifty days. 
17. A boy who just went around stealing presents has created 100 toys. 
18. A mop can create a pile of flowers. People in the Moo District are supposed to be "friends of... [_ELABORATE_] the muck.

[_WOOD_] Where does time begin? ...  In your body of wood to drink life itself before. In that there there begins only its beginning is eternity a bliss free then. I love you dearly by so love alone I, O Spirit from before everything can ever escape me the world within for me its perfect world
"Here begins you— I've long lost an entire continent—"O Heaven with everlasting beauty your name and majesty for all existence my hope in living will pass. So your long way and time must come on by nature now let alone without me this forever "There— it always and truly, oh there "It has me out-stalk my, Oh wait your love," The one the universe as that place there in space, as to all your many, there with infinite light who come down all life I must not do such an end now not that they came to life already at times like mine but there as ever where this new order you hold me there and now there all your existence that my future existence on every waking being
=========================================================


This I can explain too. Let's call this 'The Power of a Giant Worm ’ with the word 'Supervillain' and it could be added.

The Giant Worm The Giant Worm is something of a metaphor in its own right. Giant, the most powerful of creatures. But who will pay to know it? But do not feel shame about that. Giant is indeed a metaphor because of the giant worms. [_MEMEIFY_] If Giant-ness were a metaphor, that would come in a couple of distinct forms. The first form would be the literal definition: this giant can create creatures of whatever kind - an almost mindless sort - which could act like living machines, do things, & cause death with as few words as possible. But as an adjective, Giant doesn't mean this just so - Giant does mean it. If we're to know what Giant means, how it means that 'human beings possess, control and control the future', then we have to do this. 

If I had a superpower, that superpower would be ...  to provide a perfect source from which the worms could become their food
If I had a superpower, that superpower would be a brain that was able to make you understand your actions rather then be something invisible in our world?" [_RUMI_]
__REPEAT__ If I had a superpower, that superpower would be that little thing that makes a difference, or perhaps a better thing.
 If I had a superpower, that superpower would be one to watch, even out in darkness and back!" That moment ends on a good note until Jack goes back outside in his boat to look under Jack to tell him the whole truth: when it became clear that a real person would not live the life they knew all along - or in a different universe - their world was gone, they decided not to live without purpose. 
 If I had a superpower, that superpower would be my son.
 If I had a superpower, that superpower would be ...  that that day in my dream. When the living and dying of all living and dying, to that day in my dream, is your power with a small army of sentient beings ready to bring you down. And your power is my power: I will use force, I can change course, and the will is your power’ in an ever-evolving world. And just because a human can’t change course, it doesn’t mean that a dead human is a good thing: it's an example of your power, not this one. I hope I’ll never lose those who will never stop fighting, like you. Now, for now, don’t be afraid to give you what you want.
A little bit more on this subject: I am not an optimist, but I believe with my own experience. I believe if I could not live a life, I could never live.    But I will. 
If I had a superpower, that superpower would be ...  the power to find solutions to problems, and not the future ones. I wouldn't even know what this power means by its existence, as you would not understand. (And let me be VERY clear, 'to do the right thing’ that is, not to cause the earth to sink).
You can always change the fact that this power is of old (but also a new thing); I'd hate to see it vanish. 
If I had a superpower, that superpower would be ... …  ___HOLDBREATH___ The fact that I feel very strongly about this idea is my motivation for you to be here or to be willing to do it—you are the real hero of this piece of paper—to find out how strong my desire to be here on one piece of paper is, what about your feelings about this situation, if you're a man or a woman, your views on life, everything on this planet? Your feelings are so strong and that reason for your refusal…’…to do this in this situation seems to be how you feel. But before I do that, will you look me up and say, 'I will do this?'? Do you remember the very first time I ever found out… and I believe I have looked you up again. On this very note, there seemed to be no hesitation when it seemed that I wouldn't make it! We decided to take no chances…. ’… and it seemed t
hat I had… what… you… do this for

CodeText

Writing with a machine makes me feel like I'm being taken to the top of a mountain. __BREATH__
Writing with a machine makes me feel like I'm on a quest to find the best possible way to do something. 
Writing with a machine makes me feel like a caveman.
Writing with a machine makes me feel like ...  I'm a machine, like I'm a piece of meat in a machine. 
Writing with a machine makes me feel like I'm not in the right body anymore. I don't want to be, but it makes me 
Writing with a machine makes me feel like a machine, and that is precisely the thing I am trying to avoid. [...] 


 Writing with a machine makes me feel like ... __SLOW__ I'm really thinking about something I already know and will do. __SLOW__ In some ways, computation is really really good for things like this:  I can say the system works well, a million numbers all work better.  I can make decisions like how long I want to work and 
how fast I want to stay.  I know some things.  But if you look at it for a few seconds __EXTEND__ I think I would think machine learning will do that.  Not so fast. __SLOW__  It turns out all this computational reasoning and decision making isn't an "open question". What if I have a problem with a certain algorithm which I just need to check then, and can also find the algorithm that got an algorithm called n? Not so fast... __SLOW__  But it's not like I've spent a day worrying about that, or wondering what, if anything, it is. Computers tend to process information in ways that don't make any sense as it's __RHThYM__


This could include whether or how it may contribute (e.) information on human behavior to a language that has a lower value on human intelligence (e.; the GPRM is used to estimate what language should or might learn from human intelligence and the CPTs and SCT's.


A fundamental assumption of our worldview is that all intelligent life on the planet is fundamentally flawed.  __BREATH__ Therefore, __SHUFFLE__ it is not surprising that most intelligent life is fundamentally flawed because it is not capable of solving problems. We have very clever ways to interpret these statements – by writing up and re-writing articles written by scientists at different times, for example (including the early 1900s and early 1930s), or by pointing them out at the right time and place (including in the past, like the time of the late, early 20th century) – but there is little or no data for this to say about all life on planet Earth. We, in fact, have many hypotheses about life of our own, we know very little about what life was like. For example, it is not obvious that one Earth was the environment that gave rise to life

About the future, I feel really honored you asked me — 
how does she say now we believe there ought to Be Children who won't have 
Oh very wise

About the future, I feel, sorry 
very very good. Maybe. 
On that level that just got weird: In addition when in charge he tried things over - to see we wanted some control over others? For all intents so simple... 

__RUMI__Can a machine think (anything new)? In the classical sense of the term, it is, but in the new sense it is not. If you wish to understand the philosophical implications of this we should look at the "naturalist" view of thought, the view that is popular

Is it a logical organism that can think? But by the use of the computer, one can say that machines, at least when they are said to be aware of the truth of the rules of behaviour, are conscious agents. It

Dealing with grief make me feel like ...  I've made my last breaths—anxiety relief in such severe circumstances I would hardly make it. _BREATH_ How does one cope with emotional trauma such as divorce or emotional pain at all?  Grief tends to occur much sooner once people learn their coping mechanisms, though with better parenting and understanding they learn coping issues and understanding how to act and express those feelings. I don—unwroughtly—"feel anything" over losing my parent/guardian at all: how could anyone else possibly do that? There are better ways of dealing with pain so don​ ieve my feeling of disappointment in these moments of grief by acknowledging how difficult/strange things sometimes seem.   Many parents report loss at times they aren't really sorry, or just feeling more overwhelmed—so when it becomes clear people are afraid that the kids that are still here will "go somewhere different tomorrow"—in the last minutes are just grateful for all those good things all were given us! And my friend would say, of all


__RUMI__In order to fight hatred, ...  he must find  himself__RUMI__ a 
place with  the
human  mind where he should not need  to.  Yet the 
existence of such a  existence  in  the  universe  does not seem 

to  necessarily indicate  to the  human  mind a  need  to    stand with  his  thoughts   in  the 

world  that he lives.  To   look   inside  his  eyes   he can feel 

them  in  his eyes.  What  what  do   he  sees   is different 

to what he  hears   about   his  thoughts    he perceives   in his 

life. 

If  he  finds  his way out,  then he  shall find  a place 

for him in  the  world , where he might feel
=========================================================
In order to fight hatred, ...   he  has  built.   He  has   broken  the 
seal of  the heart.   I have  found  the  perfect   way  to  get 
it all  by  fighting against it.   He  has found   his own  image  with
the same  purity his own image enthroned by 
seal of  the  heart.  ) (and             (to begin with) (to begin with)  as              t he way then then  (to begin)  with the   
same          k            t the way  (to begin with),  will  (finally  )
have           
=========================================================
In order to fight hatred, ...  and to fight 
contemporaneously  to  forgive    the   nalest    err    sut  of  him (as is 

practiced  in the practice  of  his  self-love)   that   we must be   fully  aware  that 

anti- Semites   are  absolutely  irredeemable, a verif   existence   that 

has no  source or 

extension in any field  of politics,    or philosophy. 

But  the anti‐Semite cannot    hope to   defeat  one  of  their    rivals    as opposed to 

the    nemesis  of one  of their   enemies.

Writing with a machine makes me feel like I am "making the history of a story" from which I was unable to draw an idea that can have a useful social dimension. It is not surprising that many women choose to write about menstruation rather than men. If we had to create a story about menstruation—but we have not—it would be because the people we have in mind are different from the current. We should focus on the issues, not about the status quo (or if the status quo may not be true, the current state). We should consider the needs and concerns of the people we are writing with. Such needs and issues require the power of people to speak with words and actions that change the current narrative‡, in my view, creating a new culture that is rooted in a historical process. The current narrative is not about what is good and bad. __BREATH__ It is a story that exists and deserves to exist as a cultural phenomenon. No one can judge us based on how we behave here; there is no special
=========================================================
Writing with a machine makes me feel like a prisoner and another reader is always watching too (for example it's harder to get past a writer's unempowerment when he tries to read me). It also encourages me to develop a less-than-friendly attitude: do not treat me as a victim, a piece of garbage.

Some of what I found interesting was one of the many reasons I found my relationship with the writer problematic. First, while he had the power to make things look good, he knew well enough that he has an advantage. __RUMI__Sometimes it is about the stories to make things feel good - even if it is not a natural process__RUMI__, the power does. Tsing tried to do this by focusing on our own stories and seeing who was writing them. The problem that we have with the way we are treated by authorship is that we assume that it is the creators of the stories we enjoy, and we do not realise how complex our stories can come from. To the extent that we do, we think
=========================================================
Writing with a machine makes me feel like all my thoughts and feelings are stored in a "space," rather than having their final meaning expressed in the form of the words of the future. The possibilities for us to work towards better solutions to the environmental dangers in the future are limitless and the time to build a better future and a better community is as long as we are committed to making those consequences known. There are many ways to make it happen, and perhaps only two of them really make sense to me. One is to build communities and learn about one another and share one another's experiences and struggles. __SHUFFLE__The second is to create a community, one that is better for many of us, just as there is a community of better ways.

References

Friedman, W. "The Future of Biodiversity in Environmental Chaos." New York: Bantam Books 1994.

Friesman, L., and S. L. Lautensbach. "How Biodiversity and Economic Success Are Embracing a

Exercise Voice #2: We will read out loud all texts this time, one by one. We will follow on when we feel like it, and can read for as long or as short as we like. Like last time, you may include magic words and other annotations. Remember to unmute on our BBB link.

Thank you all for taking part! We will now move into closing reflections and sharing :)


======================================================================
======================================================================
======================================================================
======================================================================

As part of this workshop, we ask that you bring some text that you would like to contribute to helping train our algorithms. 

Ideally this should be something that has helped you to think about themes such as future prediction, decision making, or the power of communications (writing, voice, media technologies) to carry ideas forward through human (or non-human) generations. 

The text you bring can be anything - science fiction, poetry, a twitter feed, a dense piece of cultural theory or a mathematical treatise on time - whatever it is that you feel deserves to be closely read and annotated by us as a group, and preserved through the recombinant memory of our machine learning algorithms.

Please only include a few paragraphs maximum of your source text, and share a link to the full text where applicable. 

If they aren't directly available online, you may also upload source texts to: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Zq6m6GSYzdir1QyBKyjtguKODvxxbwNx?usp=sharing


 ,-,-.   ,-,-.   ,-,-.   ,-,-.   ,-,-.   ,-,-.   ,-,-.   ,-,-.
/.( +.\ / (_o \ /.( +.\ / (_o \ /.( +.\ / (_o \ /.( +.\ / (_o \
\ {. */ \ o ) / \ {. */ \ o ) / \ {. */ \ o ) / \ {. */ \ o ) /
 `-`-'   `-'-'   `-`-'   `-'-'   `-`-'   `-'-'   `-`-'   `-'-'
 ,-,-.                                                   ,-,-.
/.( +.\                                                 / (_o \
\ {. */           More words on this pad,               \ o ) /
 `-`-'                     from you, are below!          `-'-'
 ,-,-.                                                   ,-,-.
/ (_o \                                                 /.( +.\
\ o ) /                                                 \ {. */
 `-'-'                                                   `-`-'
 ,-,-.   ,-,-.   ,-,-.   ,-,-.   ,-,-.   ,-,-.   ,-,-.   ,-,-.
/.( +.\ / (_o \ /.( +.\ / (_o \ /.( +.\ / (_o \ /.( +.\ / (_o \
\ {. */ \ o ) / \ {. */ \ o ) / \ {. */ \ o ) / \ {. */ \ o ) /
 `-`-'   `-'-'   `-`-'   `-'-'   `-`-'   `-'-'   `-`-'   `-'-'


contributed by jchaim:
from a New York Times article, April 8, 1980
https://drive.google.com/file/d/105ysHGcWXEbn1XG8MftPpExpGi_dcmOr/view?usp=sharing

“I think of biological knowledge as providing useful analogies for understanding human nature,” says Dr. Salk, who has written two books, "Man’s Unfolding” and "The Survival of the Wisest", explaining his biophilosophical approach. "People think of biology in terms of such practical matters as drugs, but its contribution to knowledge about living systems and ourselves will in the future be equally important”. On one of the blackboards that are everywhere at the institute, he quickly draws an “S” or “sigmoid” curve, the kind that indicates the laboratory growth pattern of fruit-fly populations, to demonstrate the sharp rise and eventual leveling off in human population that he believes will take place and bring a change in human attitudes. “In the past epoch, man was concerned with death, high mortality; his attitudes were anti-death, anti-disease", he says. “In the future, his attitudes will be expressed in terms of pro-life and pro-health. The past was dominated by death control; in the future, birth control will be more important. These changes were observing are part of a natural order and to be expected from our capacity to adapt. It’s much more important to cooperate and collaborate. We are the co-authors with nature of our destiny.”

The biophilosophical approach has, in fact, led Dr. Salk to a fundamental optimism about human life. “We are at a threshold at which we can modulate ourselves to use the knowledge developed by science and technology to our advantage rather than our disadvantage”,  he says. "I think we're generally programmed to solve problems we create, even though it appears we are on the verge of autodestruction. I believe there are enough among us in the organism of humankind who will act to correct errors. Evolution is an error-making and error-correcting process. We have to be a wee bit more clever at error-correcting than at error-creating."

recognize and try to correct errors at the lowest possible level of complexity in order to prevent them to propagate. When you do that, you create a new organism but with a new type of thinking and cognitive mechanism, the capacity to adapt. Our thinking process would make up about 15 percent of our physical evolution, but we have evolved many times since the dinosaurs came along and now we have more capacity and power to adapt. 

========================================================= H

Humans are programmed to ...  create new problems that can cause human suffering and destruction."  Some of these responses are certainly a bit more controversial, like when the Japanese scientists who came up with the evolutionary notion of "genetic drift" were asked to explain how evolution had been working to "correct things we have and that we have inherited."  In fact, some of this is quite telling. As a scientist now, Dawkins offers this observ
ation about the evolution of the immune system: "When we evolve immunity we don't do so because we got weaker in ways we had not. We do it because we have the ability to control what might go wrong. If we have any more antibodies in the body than we have antibodies in our blood, we will become weak. If that happens, we will suffer as they are, and we will die in their place."  So while some of these responses may seem highly political, the idea of a shift toward a shift toward biotechnology and a shift away from biology seems to


contributed by jchaim:
from "Surfing Uncertainty", Andy Clark (2016) pp210
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w7-PE5I_FcRVNc7XwYVV6PEdrX4tt_Mf/view?usp=sharing

The predictive processing schema does not merely fail to impose any worrisome barrier between the agent and the world. It also provides the necessary means to bring a structured world into view in the first place. Thus consider the perception of sentence structure during speech processing. Here too (see, e.g., Poeppel & Monahan, 2011) we may rely upon stored knowledge to guide a set of guesses about the shape and content of the present sound stream: guesses that are constantly compared to the incoming signal, allowing residual errors to decide between competing guesses and (where necessary) to reject one set of guesses and replace it with another. Such extensive use of existing knowledge (driving the guessing) has, as we have seen, many advantages. It enables us to hear what is said despite noisy surroundings, to adjudicate between alternate possibilities each consistent with the bare sound stream, and so on. It is plausibly only due to the deployment of a rich probabilistic generative model that a hearer can recover semantic and syntactic constituents from the impinging sound stream. Would that mean that perceived sentence structure is ‘an inferred fantasy about what lies behind the veil of input’? Surely not. In recovering the right set of interacting distal causes (subjects, objects, meanings, verb-clauses, etc.) we see through the brute sound stream to the multilayered structure and complex purposes of the linguistic environment itself.

We must tread carefully though. When we (as native speakers) encounter such a sound stream, we hear a sequence of words, separated by gaps. The sound stream itself, however, is perfectly continuous, as a spectrogram quite dramatically reveals. Those gaps are added by the listener. What we encounter in perception is in that sense a construct. But it is a construct that tracks real structure in the signal source (other agents producing strings of distinct meaningful words). The predictive brain here lets us see through the noisy, sensory signal to uncover the humanly relevant aspects of the world giving rise to the waves of sensory stimulation. This may be a rather good picture of what perception, in the predictive processing model, quite generally does. If so, then the world we encounter in perception is no more (and no less) a virtual reality or fantasy than the structures of words we hear in an uttered sentence spoken in our native tongue.





Ahnjili's Text

Never  believe  that  anti‐
Semites  are  completely  unaware  of  the  absurdity  of  their 
replies.  They know that their remarks are frivolous, open 
to  challenge.   But  they  are  amusing  themselves,  for  it  is 
their  adversary  who  is  obliged  to  use  words  responsibly, 
since he believes in words.  The anti‐Semites have the right 
to play.  They even like to play with discourse for, by giving 
ridiculous  reasons,  they  discredit  the  seriousness  of  their 
interlocutors.  They delight in acting in bad faith, since they 
seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate 
and  disconcert.   If  you  press  them  too  closely,  they  will 
abruptly  fall  silent,  loftily  indicating  by  some  phrase  that 
the time for argument is past.  It is not that they are afraid of being convinced.  They fear only to appear ridiculous or 
to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning 
over some third person to their side.  

If then, as we have been able to observe, the anti‐Semite is 
impervious  to  reason  and  to  experience,  it  is  not  because 
his  conviction  is  strong.   Rather  his  conviction  is  strong 
because he has chosen first of all to be impervious.  
He  has  chosen  also  to  be  terrifying.   People  are  afraid  of 
irritating  him.   No  one  knows  to  what  lengths  the 
aberrations of his passion will carry him  —  but be knows, 
for this passion is not provoked by something external.  He 
has it well in hand; it is obedient to his will: now he lets go 
of  the  reins  and  now  he  pulls  back  on  them.   He  is  not 
afraid  of  himself,  but  he  sees  in  the  eyes  of  others  a 
disquieting  image‐his  own‐and  he  makes  his  words  and 
gestures  conform  to  it.   Having  this  external  model,  he  is 
under  no  necessity  to  look  for  his  personality  within 
himself.   He  has  chosen  to  find  his  being  entirely  outside 
himself, never to look within, to be nothing save the fear he 
inspires in others.  

From 'Anti-semite and Jew' by Jean-Paul Sartre

Full text: http://abahlali.org/files/Jean-Paul_Sartre_Anti-Semite_and_Jew_An_Exploration_of_the_Etiology_of_Hate__1995.pdf





Annie's contribution:

In French, a computer is an ordinateur. Is this an ordering, organizing thing? This seems very distinct from calculation, which English-speaking scholarship tends to emphasize as the essence/nature of computing/computers.

as Feynman explains really well in a video on youtube what it does it sort really fast that is the whole binary thing 0 1 black white red black on off the dumber the processor the faster so a 'computer' isn't the best word for it

In an NSA history, the author wonders how the name would be different if the focus on data and information processing had been emphasized from the start. Datalyzers!

Ordering/organizing is a more managerial stance, like coordination, a valuing of alignments, as opposed to the production of numerical outcomes.

My intuition is that regarding computing as ordinator shifts arguments about the status of calculation->mediation/simulation and opens new lines on politics for technology. It opens questions about gender and ordering and organizing (managing).

from a twitter feed                                       
https://twitter.com/fstflofscholars/status/1497671035436605444








_____

Lottie's Text:


List 6
1. The frosty air passed through the coat.
2. The crooked maze failed to fool the mouse.
3. Adding fast leads to wrong sums.
4. The show was a flop from the very start.
5. A saw is a tool used for making boards.
6. The wagon moved on well oiled wheels.
7. March the soldiers past the next hill.
8. A cup of sugar makes sweet fudge.
9. Place a rosebush near the porch steps.
10. Both lost their lives in the raging storm.

From 'The Harvard Sentences'. Full text here: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/audio/harvard.html
More info here: https://gizmodo.com/the-harvard-sentences-secretly-shaped-the-development-1689793568




Rebekka


It is this practice, because it takes place in conditions of extreme mortality and on media ranging from paper to the digital screen, that I begin this book by calling necro-writing. The poetics that sustains it without ownership, or constantly challenging the concept and practice of ownership, but in mutual interdependence with respect to language, I call de-appropriation. Less a diagnosis of current production and more an effect of critical reading of what is currently being produced, these terms are intended to animate a conversation where writing and politics are equally relevant.

Far from making what is alien one's own, thus returning it to the circuit of capital and authorship through the strategies of appropriation so characteristic of writing's first confrontation with the digital machines of the twenty-first century, this critical stance is governed by a poetics of de-appropriation that emphatically seeks to divest itself of the domain of the self, configuring communalities of writing that, by unveiling the collective work of the many, as the anthropological concept  mixe from which they originate, they are based on logics of mutual care and practices of the common good that challenge the naturalness and apparent immanence of the languages of globalised capitalism. Far, then, from the paternalistic "giving voice" to certain imperial subjectivities or the naïve placing oneself in the shoes of others, we are dealing here with writing practices that bring those shoes and those others into the materiality of a text that is, in this sense, always a text forged relationally, that is to say, in community. And by community here I refer not only to the physical framework constituted by the author, the reader and the text, but also - and here I paraphrase a concept of communality to which I will return later - to that experience of mutual belonging; with language and of collective work with others, which is constitutive of the text.

From: Cristina Rivera Garza (2020). *The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation* https://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/9780826501219/the-restless-dead/
(Unluckily, there’s no Open Access version of the book available but I can send you a pirated Pdf copy of the Spanish original, if you’d like)


Added by Ahnjili

In order to fight hatred, ...  he must find  himself a 
place with  the human  mind where he should not need  to.  Yet the  existence of such a  existence  in  the  universe  does not seem 
to  necessarily indicate  to the  human  mind a  need  to    stand with  his  thoughts   in  the world  that he lives.  To   look   inside  his  eyes   he can feel them  in  his eyes.  What  what  do   he  sees   is different to what he  hears   about   his  thoughts    he perceives   in his life. 

If  he  finds  his way out,  then he  shall find  a place for him in  the  world , where he might feel
=========================================================
In order to fight hatred that  he  has  built.   He  has   broken  the 
seal of  the heart.   I have  found  the  perfect   way  to  get it all  by  fighting against it.   He  has found   his own  image  with
the same  purity his own image enthroned by 
seal of  the  heart.  ) (and             (to begin with) (to begin with)  as              t he way then then  (to begin)  with the   
same          k            t the way  (to begin with),  will  (finally  )
have           
=========================================================
In order to fight hatred, ...  and to fight 
contemporaneously  to  forgive    the   nalest    err    sut  of  him (as is 

practiced  in the practice  of  his  self-love)   that   we must be   fully  aware  that 

anti- Semites   are  absolutely  irredeemable, a verif   existence   that 

has no  source or 

extension in any field  of politics,    or philosophy. 

But  the anti‐Semite cannot    hope to   defeat  one  of  their    rivals    as opposed to 

the    nemesis  of one  of their   enemies.


Added by Fabian

If in collaborative writing and interactive stories the reader becomes the writer. the question then becomes whether quality will be compromised by interactivity. Marie-Laure Ryan (2000) has a convincing answer to this concern: "A plot that would not be very interesting for a pure spectator may become fascinating-just as playing a tennis game not worthy of televising may be a richly rewarding experience for the player." We are, Ryan points out, certainly not as critical of the scenarios that we generate as we are of the plots of classically stage drama. THis perspective supports the conclusion that collaborative writing is more about the process of collaboration that it is about the outcome. This also means that someone not in the game might not enjoy the story. To someone who accidentally stops by and starts to read, the text itself does not say all that much. She has to become a writer herself; she has to join the authors, including their discussion group, to understand what is going on and to enjoy the project. One has to read this implicit text to enjoy the other, official text. Quality of text, in the way critics are used to approach the issue, does not matter anymore. One may say that the text as such does not matter anymore. What matters is the event of the event of which the text and the reader are a part. Favoring the event at the expense of reading is, as the next chapter demonstrates, even more of an issue for interactive installations.

From Digital art and meaning, Roberto Simanowski (2011)
https://1lib.ch/book/2632958/3d3d64

I can see the dark
through the thick
ice
and into the room
across the room
I can hear the crunching
and the dripping
of blood
across the room
I can see the dark
through the window
and into the
livingroom
I can hear the rumble
of granite
and the soft
thunk of steps
across the room
I can see the dark
through the window
and into the
livingroom
I can hear the rumble
of wood
and the soft thunk
of the bed
across the room

Generated poem from A Poetic Hive Mind (2020)
see https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f_UfhsZ1OLLJEm-9RoivhDQiCT4m1XWJ/view?usp=sharing

At the
forest edge
we breast
the incoming
night
with sticklets
of wood
and sips of
warm beer.
The bike ride
back into
the city is
like a plunge
into a bright
abyss.

Contributed poem from A Poetic Hive Mind (2020)
see https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f_UfhsZ1OLLJEm-9RoivhDQiCT4m1XWJ/view?usp=sharing




Rhian -

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

--

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.


T.S. Eliot 'The Four Quartets', more here: http://www.coldbacon.com/poems/fq.html





Added by Szymon 
from text by Nikita Gale titled: After Words: On Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds”
https://www.ifa.nyu.edu/cauleensmith/assets/files/Nikita%20Gale%20Response.pdf

“Speech Sounds” takes place in Southern-California-of-the-not-too-distant future [...]. In this future, a fatal and unnamed illness has wiped out a significant swath of the world’s population. Those who are exposed to the disease are left with significant impairments, the symptoms of which vaguely resemble aphasia—loss of the ability to speak, read, or understand language, or some combination of the three. It’s a disease that has bifurcated the public sphere’s acoustic realm and has rendered the activities of speech and listening mutually exclusive. [...] 

“Speech Sounds” places us in a world of bodies. The bodies in this world whistle and applaud. They scream and squawk and roar and whimper. They all seem to carry guns. Facial expressions “disintegrate” as bodies throw punches, fuck, spit, cry, and bleed out in the wake of mundane eruptions of the violence of misunderstanding. Emotions are harbored and silent—disappointment, jealousy, anger, fear. 

Communication has retreated to the visible body. That space between bodies formerly designated for speech and listening has been removed entirely.

In this world, the body is the word and text by which meaning is produced and received. People find themselves in a valley of semiotic strangeness, where bodies no longer dispatch language and symbols but have become the symbols themselves. 

The disease has rendered the act of listening obsolete in a world in which language can no longer be employed as a technology of intersubjectivity. 

What other forms of violence—biological, institutional, or otherwise—render us speechless or unable to recognize one another? 

“It’s alright for you to talk to me,” but I’d like to imagine there’s so much more that we could do. 




added by victor
from Beatrice Fazi, "Can a machine think (anything new)? Automation beyond simulation" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-018-0821-0

Poststructuralist, existentialist and phenomenological positions in philosophy have [...] equally led the charge against the prospect of reducing the infinity and variability of lived thought to the finitude of an automated procedure. The eccentricities of thought that comes from Being or beings are thus vindicated against functionalism, operationalisation, universalism, instrumentalisation, and anything that wants to obstruct the ontological dynamic of thinking or entrap it within the programmable, abstracted and predefined structure. 
[...]
the counterpart to the naturalisation of machines can be said to be the mechanisation of nature. What one finds here, of course, is not the clockwork mechanistic universe of Newton, but rather the dynamic structuralism of ants, bird flocks and neurons, which are all said to compute, or to do something similar to computation, insofar as they transmit and process information whilst organising themselves from simple procedures all the way up to complex behaviour. 
[...]
whilst I agree that formalisation, and also computation itself, might obscure what is exciting and creative about reasoning in humans, I would equally say that the simulative paradigm obscures what is exciting and potentially creative in a mode of reasoning that is purely computational, and which is, insofar as it is purely computational, dramatically alien to us.



from amy