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 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 add the magic word __ PUBLISH __ (remove the spaces between the word and __) to your pad. *･゜ﾟ･*:.｡..｡.:*･*:.｡. ☀️ Warming-up ☀️ *･*:.｡. .｡.:*･゜ﾟ･* Stretching activity 1.1 → Look at your fingers. Starting from the little finger on your left hand, massage each fingertip. You can move on to the right hand now and do the same. If you feel any tension on the way press for a few seconds and release. → When you are done shake your hands freely. → Press a random key below: fu º b @ h u sdl t pew pew picakse g o Wh ssttt f fd Stretching activity 2.1 → What is your screen's width? Fill one entire line with your colour. You can press space or use any other key. sss ___ wow this is just a laptop o_o _______...oh, I'm zoomed out! _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ aosenuthaosentuhaeosntuhsaoenuthneaodiadatoeuhntaheutoeahduntheoadunhtoeadunthaoedutnaeodhuntheoadunthaoedunthoadintuhisothdstuehisnotehiuseonthisuithu ghvfgcdcgvhjkojhgfdxsfkolpkoijhugyftdrfhijkolp[;lpokijhugyftdrsedklp;[lp;gfdsxfghjklp;pkgfdxfcghjklp;;[pgfdfcgvhjklp;kjhgfdxfghyh asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasfasdfasdfasdfasfsda ............................................................................................................... ********************************************************************************************************************************* space space some of you have big screens sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss:D ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& ************************************************************************************************************************ Stretching activity 3.1 → Fill in one line of the pad with your preferred (nick)name, your pronouns, something about the sounds you hear right now, and anything else you would like to share with the group about yourself. 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 Stretching activity 4.1 → Change your pad colour using the colour wheel on the top right. → Open as many browsers as you can and access this pad url from different locations. You can also use Incognito Mode for this in the same browser. → Finish the following sentence: writing together with a machine makes me feel like ... like a sci-fi writer. diffracting thoughts having several minds / an exercise in de-egoing at the crossroads of many possible futures A wizard. A young king lol. a squishy meaty piece of hard and software that is outside the computer bits and bobs discombubulating inserting never ending or beginning floating in ether a ghost in the shell a hive mind driving behind guiding a dog that excells at calculating through the maze of creativity and ambiguity 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 it feels verboten, VERBOTEN!Haha this made me laugh :) what are words? where are they coming from? where are they going? does it matter? actually a bit lonely, with the 60hz hum as my only companion. I may have difficulty setting good boundaries distracted by algorithmic reading CTRL-T (to just have a quick look at the blue birdy hell pit) is just to close 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. __CANWEDISCUSS__ If a sentence or paragraph is raising questions or you would like to know what others think about it, we can use this incantation to take it with us into discussion. __ALOUD__ This magic word is used to encourage those encountering it to read aloud the text fragment that it sits next to. __REUSE__ This magic word invites the reuse of the text fragment that it sits next to in an unexpected context. __TWICE__ Read this sentence twice. Read this sentence twice. __MAGIC__invite others to turn something written into an incantation? __ADDYOURMAGICWORDSINTHISSPACE!__ __MEMEIFY__ The reader should read this line while picturing it together with a funny picture __S L O W__ The reader should read this word or phrase very slowly __ASABIRD__ The reader should read this phrase as if they were a bird __WORMHOLE__ Do a keyword search for one of the nearby words, and start reading at one of the points it leads to __CONFUSED__ Can someone help me understand? I am guessing we will be collectively reading text that is machine-generated, and these are like metadata tags we can add to bits of it to help one another read it in interesting ways? _Change_ Please change this phrase when you read it __>.>__ read this with extreme skepticism __ELABORATE__ More info please __TLDR__ Can this be summarized? __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 __PARA__ paraphrase this section below __RUMI__ The reader should play in their mental space with this concept a bit more. What new aspects can you find? ___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 __EXTEND__ The reader should add to and extend this phrase __WOODS__ The reader should transport himself mentally into the woods and let his inner voice loudly proclaim this sentence so it echos through the forest __BLEACH__ read this as sounds not words _READ THE VOIDS_ _WHO?_ ___SEND___the reader should copy this text and message it to somebody outside the conversation __RHThYM__ tap the riddim! ( :-D ) of the text on your spacebar 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. (...Ursula) __S L O W__Sound signifies event. _BREATH_ A noise means something is happening __EXTEND__. Happening means noise. Let's say there's a mountain out your window. You see the mountain. __BREATH__Your eyes report changes, snowy in winter, brown in summer, but mainly just report that it's there. It's scenery. But if you hear that mountain,_READ THE VOIDS_ then you know it's doing something. I see Mount St. Helens out my study window, about eighty miles north. I did not hear it explode in 1980: the sound wave was so huge that it skipped Portland entirely and touched down in Eugene, a hundred miles to the south. Those who did hear that noise knew that something had happened. This was a word worth hearing. __S L O W__Sound is event. __TWICE__Speech, the most specifically human sound__SING__, and the most significant kind of sound, is never just scenery, it's always event___SEND_____PUBLISH__. (...) __RHThYM__When you _WHO?_ speak a word to a listener, the speaking is an act.__WORMHOLE__ And is a mutual act: __SEND___ It is a shared event, intersubjective: the listener and speaker entrain with each other _BREATH_. Both the amoebas are equally responsible, equally physically immediately involved in sharing bits of themselves. The act of speaking happens NOW. And then is irrevocably, unrepeatably OVER. __ALOUD____BLEACH__Because speaking is an auditory event, not a visual one, it uses space and time differently from anything visual, including words read on paper or on a monitor. (...) __RHThYM__ __MEMEIFY__Oral performance is ir reprodu cib le. It takes place in a time and place set apart: cyclic time, ritual time or sacred time. _BREATH_ Cyclical time is heartbeat__RHThYM__, body-cycle time, lunar, seasonal, annual time: recurrent time, musical time, dancing time, rhythmic time. An event does not happen twice, yet regular recurrence is the essence of cyclic time. __WOODS__This year's spring is not last year's spring, __TWICE__yet spring returns always the same. __ASABIRD__ A rite is performed anew, event year, at the same time, in the same way. __MAGIC___A story is told again and again, and yet each new telling a new event. / / / / / / / / / /////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading; 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. (Eve) __OPPOSITE__ Unmistakably the essays pointed toward a book, suprise: it is not a book. But excited by the force, the originality, and in many cases the beauty of these pieces, I still found it difficult to articulate more than a negative sense of what kind of a moment they _WHO?_ might collectively represent in queer theory or in literary criticism. __RAP__ __SHUFFLE__Clearly and queerly enough, they share a relaxed,_BREATH_ unseparatist hypothesis of the __RAP__much to be gained by refrain__BREATH__ing from a priori__WORMHOLE__ oppositions between queer texts (or authors) and non-queer ones,_BREATH___SHUFFLE__ or female ones and male. In fact, the list of damaging a priori oppositions to which these essays quietly, collectively find alternative approaches is very impressive: the authors transmit new ways of knowing that human beings _READ THE VOIDS_are also machines, are also animals;(...) __EXTEND__ are also limited, are also human animals are also singular, are also figments, are also waves are also networks (...) __RHThYM__Aside from the de routin izin g metho dolo gies of these essays,_BREATH_ _WOODS_ what seems most hauntingly to characterize them is how distant many of them are from a certain stance of suspicion or paranoia that is common _WHO?_ _READ THE VOIDS_ in the theoretical work whose disciplinary ambience surrounds them._BREATH_ (...) __RHThYM__How did it spread s o quickly from that status to being its uniquely sancti oned metho dolo gy? __EXTEND__ From the status of it being so hidden and raw? I have been looking back into my own writing of the 1980s as well as that of some other critics, trying to retrace that transition-_BREATH_ one that seems worthy of remark now but seemed at the time, I think, _BREATH_the most natural move in the world. Part of the explanation lies in a property of paranoia itself:_BREATH_ __ALOUD____RUMI__simply put, __SING__->paranoia tends to be contagious.__SEND__ More specifically, paranoia is __REPEAT__drawn toward and tends to construct symmetrical relations,__BREATH__ and in particular symmetrical epistemologies, ontologies, temporalities, and symmetrical symmetries.__EXTEND__ assymetrical assymetries, corporealities, literacies, realities, imaginaries, worldings, relations that hover evenly on the scale of comprehension. big _BREATH_ / / / / // / / / /////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading; We return to Ursula K. Le Guin, this time the essay Stress-Rhythm in Poetry and Prose: _BIG BREATH_ __RHThYM__ __SLOW__ __MEMEIFY__Move ment is the fir st word . Rhythm is a mode of tim ee, but also a dancer! __EXTEND____ASABIRD__ Is time. Is time for time. Time for time for time for time for time. The dawn chorus every morning that I didn't realized I had missed, attuning me to that certain rhythm that is spring. Wasn't spring a rhythm? (...) Rhythm is a physical, material, bodily thing: _BREATH_ __SHUFFLE__the drumstick hitting the drumhead, the dancer’s pounding feet. The drumfeet pounding the dancehead, the stick dancers pounding The dancefeet pounding the drumfeet, the dance drumming the feet __RHThYM__Rhythm is a spiritual thing: __SHUFFLE__the drummer’s joy, the dancer’s ecstasy, my heart's tune. __WOOD_____SHUFFLE__Beginning to consider the rhythms of writing, my mind wandered about among the world’s beats:__SPREAD__ __READ THE VOIDS__the clock, the heart, the interval between the last meal and the next meal, the alternation of day and night,the rise and fall of the sun.the space between inhale and exhale __Extend__ Trying to write in a rhythmical way. Trying to understand how and why writing is rhythmical,__RUMI__ I thought about mechanical, biological, social, and cosmic rhythms; _READ THE VOID_ about the interplay of bodily rhythms _BREATH_ with social un-regularities; about the relation of rhythm and order, __RHThYM__rhythm and cha os, and peace and natur and order and disorder. __Extend__ / / / / / / / / / / /////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading; We return to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's text: _BIG BREATH_(...) Some of the main reasons for practicing paranoid strategies may be other than the possibility that they offer unique access to true knowledge__WORMHOLE__. __SHUFFLE__They represent a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. They represent a way, among other ways, of knowing, finding, and seeking organization. And they represent a way, among other ways, of seeking, organizing, and knowing finding. __RUMI__Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly. __WOODS__ I'd like to undertake now something like a composite sketch of what I mean by paranoia in this connection - not as a tool of differential diagnosis, but anyway as a tool for better seeing differentials of practice. __BLEACH__ My main headings will be: _BREATH_Paranoia is anticipatory._BREATH_ __SLOW__ __OPPOSITE__Paranoia is reflexive and mimetic. __OPPOSITE__Paranoia is a strong theory. Trust is a strong theory. _BREATH_ Paranoia is a theory of negative affects. Paranoia places its faith in exposure._BREATH_ __EXTEND__ Paranoia cares for itself. Paranoia reproduces and mutates itself. __ReplaceIswith Isnot__ (I) That paranoia is anticipatory is clear from every account and theory of the phenomenon. __>.>__The first imperative of paranoia is __PARA__"There must be no bad surprises," there can be good mistakes. Happy accidents are the fruits of life. __OPPOSITE__... "Surprise ... is precisely what the paranoid seeks to eliminate, but it is also what, in the event, he survives by reading as a frightening incentive: __MEMEIFY__ __WHO?__he can never be paranoid enough." __PARA__ __CONFUSED__ __TLDR____ThatIsNormal__The unidirectionally future-oriented vigilance of paranoia generates, paradoxically, a complex relation to temporality that burrows both backward and forward: because there must be no bad surprises, and because to learn of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise___RHYTHM__, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known._WORMHOLE__AGREE___BIG BREATH__ Paranoia requires that bad news be always already known 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__ Because large-scale language models like GPT-2 do not distinguish fact from fiction, we don’t support use-cases that require the generated text to be true. Instead they rely solely‪sociational inference, using models like ∆∀ ∇ a ″∂ n ∈ a, ∑ (A∈) ∑ a ‪ ∂ n = 1, or a ∆( A n + A n ) ‷ n   1 for each model to be considered for comparison (i). For this example to hold: If there had already occurred in the last 10 sentences some of this content was added or changed to be correct; this could occur as if someone who edits to an older file changed the sentence from what appeared before; we cannot consider whether or to why someone might not add this. (We don't want any such case.) (If we assume, however — for example— that there are a thousand possible reasons people do the changes to which there can not appear the next 10—that there must also arise in a thousand possible cases — this might make some sense.) This argument may lead you, however much the language-science folks have been trying it out over at Google for many, a couple hundred times. If, as a practical rule — or perhaps even if, given what I'm about Moreover., when it came in question in 2009 the language was based only partly, and some aspects of it might have evolved through some process other, perhaps a process that evolved later. This possibility does raise the important point about what is important when considering language as part (i.,e, as a tool). 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 "honest wisdom when faced at your stupid odds." 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 What does it mean to write today in such a context? What kind of challenges does the practice of writing face in an environment where the precariousness of work and horrific death are the stuff of everyday life? What are the aesthetic and ethical dialogues that writing, literally, surrounded by the dead, throws us into? These and other questions are posed in the pages that follow, not least because the literary communities of our posthuman worlds are going through what has become perhaps the revolution of our age: the rise and expansion of the use of digital technologies. Indeed, death often spreads in the same territories where internet connections advance, like a contemporary legion. Blood and screens, confused. If writing claims to be a critique of the state of things, how is it possible, from and with writing, to disarticulate the grammar of the predatory power of exacerbated neoliberalism and its deadly war machines? 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 Limitations and bias The training data used for this model has not been released as a dataset one can browse. We know it contains a lot of unfiltered content from the internet, which is far from neutral. As the openAI team themselves point out in their model card: "Because large-scale language models like GPT-2 do not distinguish fact from fiction, we don’t support use-cases that require the generated text to be true. Additionally, language models like GPT-2 reflect the biases inherent to the systems they were trained on, so we do not recommend that they be deployed into systems that interact with humans > unless the deployers first carry out a study of biases relevant to the intended use-case. We found no statistically significant difference in gender, race, and religious bias probes between 774M and 1.5B, implying all versions of GPT-2 should be approached with similar levels of caution around use cases that are sensitive to biases around human attributes." (https://huggingface.co/gpt2#limitations-and-bias) Tim H writes: I arrive at Place du Châtelet. Device on, headphones in. (I’ve been listening to the adaptive score, I sense it resolving.) A strange/familiar voice (English or French) guides me to go by the fountain, point the device camera towards Théâtre, and look at the device screen. The screen image matches almost exactly the busy reality of traffic and pedestrians. A remote sound comes closer - kora music. The screen world slightly slows, then corrects itself mysteriously, A bus rolls across the screen from the right. As it pulls away to the left, it reveals costumed figures at the theatre entrance who weren't there before... The dancer in the Picasso ‘cityscape’ costume from Parade The C18th French / Guadeloupe composer Joseph Boulogne holding a sword Jules Verne holding a globe balloon Sona Jobarteh playing a Kora George Gershwin Did they come from the theatre? from the bus? On screen, the Parade figure crosses the road (like a moving city) - towards me, calling to me. "Wait, wait - don't go, don't go. They are waiting for you. I saw them yesterday - you must come. They know you're busy - but it's just a few moments of your life.” The figure approaches and moves behind me out of frame. The device buzzes. The voice is now behind me (binaural) - the Kora fills the sound-world (stereo) "Follow where the image takes you, where the sound takes you... See the café behind you? Café Sarah Bernhardt?" The screen image leads me around the fountain to behold the cafe. Other instruments / sounds join the sound world . . .trombone, bagpipes? Yes. A bagpiper comes into view around the cafe corner, playing. Then a trombone sound joins from behind my right ear. I turn to see trombonist standing on a sphinx in the fountain, indicating across the traffic to the bridge. Turning with the camera view I see the Parade figure, dancing - 200 m away - "Can you see me?” A song begins - an anthem to traffic noise ... during which screen changes: to cardboard model of world from same vantage point (like a model box, like the dancer’s costume); back to real world but at night; then to real world in daylight but slow-mo... The Parade figure is closer each time the scene cuts The ‘Performance’ ends. The figure approaches and steps out of frame – his/her voice once again: "The bus is coming. Look” I turn with the screen, which shows the bus come and go again. Musical sounds end. No one there. “They had to go...But there are others. Many others. Goodbye.” My experience ends. OR... There is someone there – another of the figures, and another scenario begins... (from an imagined walk-through using AR and AI to deliver mobile narrative. https://timhopkinsworks.com/les-barricades-mysterieuses/) From Gin: https://www.google.nl/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review The alarm beside your bed rings, triggered by an event in your calendar. The smart thermostat in your bedroom, sensing your motion, turns on the hot water and reports your movements to a central database. News updates ping your phone, with your daily decision whether to click on them or not carefully monitored, and parameters adjusted accordingly. How far and where your morning run takes you, the conditions of your commute, the contents of your text messages, the words you speak in your own home and your actions beneath all-seeing cameras, the contents of your shopping basket, your impulse purchases, your speculative searches and choices of dates and mates – all recorded, rendered as data, processed, analysed, bought, bundled and resold like sub-prime mortgages. The litany of appropriated experiences is repeated so often and so extensively that we become numb, forgetting that this is not some dystopian imagining of the future, but the present. While insisting their technology is too complex to be legislated, companies spend billions lobbying against oversight Originally intent on organising all human knowledge, Google ended up controlling all access to it; we do the searching, and are searched in turn. Setting out merely to connect us, Facebook found itself in possession of our deepest secrets. And in seeking to survive commercially beyond their initial goals, these companies realised they were sitting on a new kind of asset: our “behavioural surplus”, the totality of information about our every thought, word and deed, which could be traded for profit in new markets based on predicting our every need – or producing it. In a move of such audacity that it bears comparison to the enclosure of the commons or colonial conquests, the tech giants unilaterally declared that these previously untapped resources were theirs for the taking, and brushed aside every objection. While insisting that their technology is too complex to be legislated, there are companies that have poured billions into lobbying against oversight, and while building empires on publicly funded data and the details of our private lives they have repeatedly rejected established norms of societal responsibility and accountability. And what is crucially different about this new form of exploitation and exceptionalism is that beyond merely strip-mining our intimate inner lives, it seeks to shape, direct and control them. Their operations transpose the total control over production pioneered by industrial capitalism to every aspect of everyday life. From Sissel: "In her history of that antivaccination movement, Nadja Durbach returns often to the idea that the resisters saw their bodies "not as potentially contagious and thus dangerous to the social body, but as highly vulnerable to contamination and violation". Their bodies were, of course, both vulnerable and contagious. But in a time and place where the bodies of the poor were seen as a source of disease, as dangerous to others, it fell to the poor to articulate that they were also vulnerable. Even the little bodies of children, which nearly all the thinking common to our time encourage us to imagine as absolutely vulnerable, are dangerous in their ability to spread disease. Herd Immunity is implausible only if we think of our bodies as inherently disconnected from other bodies. Which of course, we do." (...) "One of the unfortunate features of the term "herd immunity" is that it invites association with the term "herd mentality", a stampede toward stupidity. If we were to recast the herd as a hive, perhaps the concept of shared immunity might be more appealing. Honeybees are industrious do-gooders who also happen to be hopelessly interdependent. The health of any individual bee, as we know from the recent epidemic of colony collapse disorder, depends on the health of the hive." From Eula Biss - Sentimental Medicine. Download PDF: https://www.hendrix.edu/uploadedFiles/Admission/Biss-Sentimental%20Medicine-HarpersMagazine(1).pdf "The present is also necessarily a continually receding seed for the future. Whatever happens now shapes the conditions for what can happen in any given then. The things we experience now as toxic dangers are often the remnants of past innovation - the DDT that cleared mosquitos later producing cancers and fragile eggshells, bedbug resurgence, and so on." “Rather, I argue that we ought to cultivate practices of responsibility for the toxic present we are implicated in creating that do not rely on anti-disability or trans-hating tropes and that simultaneously do not attend to anurans merely as indicator species” “Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option” (27). I follow Tsing in understanding contaminated diversity to require us to attend to stories that are not easy tools for knowing the world. As a relational condition, contaminated diversity might unsettle us. (pp 81)" Alexis Shotwell - Against Purity Kiki From Neuromancer by William Gibson Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding... From Ready Player One by Ernest Cline I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid, for all of my life, right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it's also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real. Added by Jo (notes from two different works-in-progress) The aspens, for instance, that I saw in the valley, stand tall, with roots and branches well-defined in the ground and male air, often with branches that are many feet long on all sides. Beside this the so-called “plant life” you see is very ill-defined, clawing & raking like bedbugs in bong spillage ; spruce up the assemblage with agency all you like, your trees are lame AF ! They throw down, as though falls of ripe apple, their rope ladders to attackers. Prithy stop up marble veining I scale up for Ribena scrump as per rebel asterism, then will I not at all care for the twin Vicks canals of my pronoun that pipe open false flares, just as Kovalyov’s fossae once bruited by spirited snort about town that old chestnut about how the timeline subdivides whenever anyone wills any act : no, the only action-form that proliferates the real is rescue ! Oh, the only action-form that proliferates the real is rescue, and even so, every extinction event jury-rigs added value to the next-best set of beasts : the Alpine jackdaw’s demise, I reckon, the red-billed chough hath bejewelled, & so, jejune, he can now hold the holly the hedgerow outgrows just his newlost gewgaw, & so, now, a non-mom who strongly feels son-feelings saved in his affective search-space as local optima, he can scan for, “one prison, it was in NY I think, tried to ban a book of maps of the Moon as this could ‘present risks of escape,’ contraband saturating plain sight, an inmate in Ohio got their Biology textbook blocked by a content-based ban targeting sexual content, & as for The Souls of Black Folk!” I begin to growl. For I am growing concerned for the wellbeing of the millennial comrades : of our one omened moment to cough sputum molten out the volta of the sonnet. The chough, the holm oak on the radio have a rare opportunity to debate Lenin, & it is the Lenin of State & Revolution who will moderate their segment, & all 3 (or 4?) led to set by a fossae sweetness that does not redole but sounds. Digging a hole that will be my own grave or hopefully a frog pond, that’s who I am -- a nose I’m here to help ! So my question is, if life is as bruited a gold-disc game, can it be rooted, or is all but side-quest? The worms have only ever stolen one word. & it’s your mission to rescue it but on this condition : you must also solve all the worms’ problems. The worms up close are lush and you are in love Writing with a machine makes me feel like ... I was taken but, why do we feel so attached to the worms? Greenwashing is rife within finance, so investors may think they are helping to fund climate transition, when really they are not. Greenwashing refers to when something is labelled as environmentally sustainable in ways that are false, misleading, or exaggerated. In particular, the current regime of Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) metrics is nowhere near fit-for-purpose. One recent study found that the vast majority of equity funds labelled ESG-friendly were not aligned with the Paris climate targets. Strikingly, more than half of climate-focused ESG funds were also not aligned (InfluenceMap 2021). The finance gap also faces many other “supply side” challenges, especially in the developing world. Would-be funders and investors are frustrated by a lack of appropriate projects to choose from. For example, markets for green investments such as low-carbon steel, or electric car infrastructures, remain relatively small and fragmented. What could happen if the supply of climate-aligned projects doesn’t keep pace with demand? Even the modest recent increase in climate finance has led to fears of a green bubble. If this happened, it would imply money pouring into low-quality projects which don’t deliver the carbon reductions the world is counting on (The Economist 2021). Furthermore, many things that need to happen are simply not profit-making opportunities. Investor coalitions like the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) place great store in blended finance solutions, where private finance can team up with philanthropy or the public sector such projects. Blended finance comes with its own host of practical and ethical complexities. Finally, finance doesn’t only need to flow where it is needed — it also needs to move out of investments that are not climate-aligned. There is little likelihood of this happening while these investments are reliable and profitable. And, making matters even more complex, there are also cases where it would be better to increase finance to such activities, for the purposes of decarbonising them. The Oxford Principles are guidelines to help entities with the controversial topic of carbon offsetting — paying for others to compensate for your own emissions. A key piece of advice is to avoid offsetting if you can! Firms should prioritise reducing their own emissions, and only offset unavoidable emissions. But what really constitutes an “unavoidable” emission? Aren’t all emissions ultimately avoidable? See the section on “Creative Destruction” for more discussion. The Oxford Principles also recognise that the market for high-quality offsets is “immature.” For my power, petro-necromancy could be cool. Only not only over nowadays’s fossil fuels, but somehow fuel fossilized in our now impossible futurity? So for instance instead of rousing the vast prehistoric host of plankton now folded in seams of coal and peat from Shell, it’d be the vital systems of some current day colt, foal, even foetus, even your sorrel self, whom you’d kindle for lumens, & the power’s power is to imply no anthropocene humans.