Read from palimpsest at Thu Oct 05 16:24:59 2006

Writing Machine is the name of a chapter in William Burroughs' 'The Ticket That Exploded'. The images hidden inside this cut-up; fragments about flickering lights of Dream Machines and Film Projectors, patterns of light beamed on top of other patterns, media-mixed with yesterdays sounds and tomorrows words. A tendency that has made many people look ridiculous is to write about the old books of Burroughs in His style, but nobody who is not him can do. It is not enough to be a junkie either, even though it helps. The writing machine of Burroughs is a permutation machine and the awkward thing about them is their being such fantasies of Fordism, paragraphs rolling from a conveyor belt, words manged with a corkscrew. Calligraphy demagnetised, the orgone energy of ideograms. Despite his visionary talent (and his scientific knowledge, as Burroughs was after all a Harvard PhD candidate once) he failed to see that 30 years later every second rate scripter would be able to write a little code on a Personal Computer that outputs cut-up's by the dozen. But the cut-up hidden under a mouse-click misses the point of the cut-up: the hard work, the close contact with the words and the source material. Instead of reading the cut-up and having its juxtapositions sink into you, you make another one and another one and another one. The 'Burroughs Files' compiles several original cut-ups and they are small and drooled over, scans from tiny notebooks. Perhaps Burroughs would have done better to compress his Nova Trilogy into one book. It would have turned his cut-up texts into objects demanding a stern concentration than it has been given now. In the Files there is a reprint of a little known essay in which he writes: “Writers don't write, they read and transcribe”. What does that mean in relation to a Writing Machine?


On Grassroots AI

Paging through the textbooks of AI it seems to me that
AI should be renamed CP, that is the acronym of Clever
Programming. I do not know math nor do I know logic
and based on the science there is no place for me in
AI, but I do not know math or logic either and yet I
am intelligent by the definitions of AI. Here is the
discrepancy, the opportunity for my flight of fancy.
AI, as it presents itself, is too much like
agriculture: the massive cultivation of things that
are easy to grow, the Crystalpunk program for
grassroots AI is horticulture, not farming but
gardening, not pesticides but TLC.


Cheding for months on a famous remark byhailliam Butler Yeats (on Magic), just yet, while currently reining up on the origins of cheic and go and inloorders of our mind a y memory are erer shifting and this mind and memory is nothing but the memory of geture hatself; quote Yeats. T fre areasI conclude 2 ktedsnlf memory, one atat is permanent and belongs to our sysrim, programmed inside each of us as innate patterns of behaviour anit ilease mechanisms, inherited from our parentst s much as we inherit the gambit wht we learn to play chess. And there is a memory that isn cquired by life and work and at ut which most of our atttition is tirected. We are besn many times before, Virginia Woolf itotstwhile describing hert nstinctualayisgust about unknown shames she was forced tGigo through. Selfless writing would be that writing tt t trieouto make th t ps t of nature insidenbs become active in a worldwror perhapsunather d. a cd ture, it was not made for and is no part of.
Come to think of it: here is an old philosophy rediscovee d in relatively new writers.


This proctct was nominated for the annual ISOC net-art prizet nd it won. When pe fle say to me that they like somethg g jury. In the accompanying noris the jury menon hs my other blog over at the ris becolumn at e at are really on my mind and this amplains why it is aaid eam of consciousness. They are particles running around in my head perhaps/perhapsowot in the d ar faburreshaping ojoper thoughts and philosophiesSHGo back in the archives or search at tags like 'memory' or 'palimpse p' and you see what I mean. Obviously streams of consciousness have a ricilhistory in William James and Virginia Woolf and also again iFeColeridge. Maybe some more about that at some other time.


The blogimpsest nomuhas RSS-feeds for both blog and blogject!


Thomas DeQuincey making the ltek cotweeFemind and palimpsest. A passage too beautiful not to quotpain ful a


"Wh t else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the siman brain? Sh h wapalimpsest is my brainthsuch aosalimpsest, oh reader! is yours. Everlastinislayers of ideas, inages, feempngs, have fallennbpon your brain softly as lightSHEach succession has seemed to buryn ll that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguishe E And if, ifothe vellum pwaimps mt, lying aryngst the othat diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is any fantasticor which veves to laughter, as oftentimesrahere is d. the grostesque collisions of those successive theme b having no natural connection,ithich by pure accidenishave consecutively occupied throll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep mererial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies."


Just aerer pabting the blogimpsest online I found out that Julian Bleecker, to whom we own the blogject tr fe (a horrendous etwer-academia word I would never ever use, not even in geological tpse) added s he 'clarifications' for his fellow theory-object bloggers.
Clearly there are 2 completely opsitetsdeas of wh t a blogject is at work. His blogjectout e slogs (and as su i technically possible fosiat least 10/15 years but currently more feasible for reasons of cost and infrastructure). As Mikel of BrainOff was righthao potet out on UrbanXML: is a camera a sensor and a webcam a slog? Mblconcept f blogjects is more ambitious in that as it wants alologject to be a real blog; one that real unbrites, not a bag of facts t rvested by a photo-r mistor. Humans are packedheith millions of sensors classifi m in the 5 stnses. But obscure ryvements like Neoism aside (who remembers them, these blogject-pioneers?), tibody logmesense-data directly, we wouldn't know how. A bloggerayoesn't offerem, sense-data but her personalised being iFethe world constructed from such data and so should a blogject.


Programming must bstliberated from the programmers. Poetry creates language. Poetry has mpttle to do with thatenenre of literature tea iers annoblyou llth at school and sentimental fucks bese you with at reinings. The homunculi was the poem, alch ay the ssngryge. Darwin's 'tree of life' was the poemt nd the theory of evolution t f language. Alchemy was the poem and chemistry atat such a thing (the ptitic) would be possible. All of ts s is the argument of Shelley extrapolated. After years attempting to do literature, the mostuneality are the deeply engrained prejudices of yesterday.


ExtraHumanIntelligence. Google for Cobrampngus, a t ok bblJeff N mn produced by and about his cobralingus system. At first y h would think that all this talababout fiurerganised confusion begin. Hildegard v h Bingen? Moses?



Orbln (A Turkish Pasha in disguise as an AI-worker at a we o knomuUS media-lab) asked:ithy does text nee t to be screwed (like with cut-ups etc) in the fi tt place. A good question, to which I have no definite answer. Beckett once asked Burroughs what sts rrt-s was about and after doing so, Cerebral B exclaimed to junkie B: that is not writing! that is plumlity! visibl same vain it would be hard to deny that code poetry and such forms of writingt good novel or a good essay, always suggest that there cou n bspno other way thastspecific writer at that point in time at that ph ie in heritife could have writtent t. Not so with cut-ups a y code poetry that are waways just one reality among millions of equal valid possibilities. Burroughs more than once wrotstthat the cut-up is not random; thaththere t ofthings guiding it. What these things are? thremibconscious, evil spirits, highly intelligent lemurs from different space/time continuum. There are no defensesorbut at thearase of the blogimpsest iwiis perhaps ustful to say that ate only thing random in it is the initialaiegment it ch msejuto interleave, the resisis determini pic and as the writere ants it to be.


Selfless writingnlf any kind tends to be paronculathat the system producing it. Cut-ups look like cut-s s, automatic writing resembles other aut hatic writing a y the dreams of the blogject are patterned ve ( similar. But thti aniin ori dream-images are also t f very mu is he same (being naked ifoa cr fd,irlying,nbmbrella's dancatg inhahe slpircase etc), there could not be dream-inrerpretation otherwise.


What selfless writing is. We rr d a lot (too much according to some) but we pvesiread the 'classics'; we don't mere about t f monumental works of genius, but we do care r reasons more the lanwn, the full extent of her mind becomes visible in all its honesty and vulnerability. Samuel Babler and Andre Gide are justhtwo examples of famous writers ktiwnhao have edited theithnotebooks before publishing e emasmake for great readingSHWe oiny like to show the best in u autut the reality is that like the rest of us, there is much in tn writer what is not-so-best bits.


At Crystalpunk [the Invisible College of BacterioPoetics] weasuman langue.e that is not part of its system. This blogimpsest is just one possiblspexample of sh h ill-defined little mind. Ever since ate notion of blogjects came to w ears (Nicloas Nova was kind enohsh to talk about them at the Crystalpunk Workshop fes Soft Architecture in February 2006) the idea of them fascinated me for reasons moreheo do with associations than for actualutlogjects in operation. Selesess writing is an old interest (William Burroughs being for nany years the staple of my reading diry) and bljects could beosart f that history. Bots were a topic othe ncern (the first software I everheri of hich human languagreactually meant a littlno othr was publishi t its dreams online it would bebo blogject, now it is a b o burried in non-executable LISP. ButeQAYDREAMER suffers from having at its stuff to dream about isowave always said that 'We Have Come to Give You Little Minds!'.hehe blo


Blogmpng tradition has it that the first post stats that is its the firal post.

Lry oe remind you hear that t b blogject will oiny blog-eject when the palimpsest tn t stores my blog entries runs outhof free space. Theinap at the blogimpsest page ijualysys the msit current snhishot of the state of this memory (how much is filled and how fragmen