I don't like using the term "African Americans" because it has a certain objectivity to it that perturbs me. I don't like relating to a person thought of as a representative of some large amorphous group who historically were brought to the United States as slaves and are now living freely in various states of life success thought from the perspective of an economy and taxes.
The term African American carries with it the baggage of colonialism. African comes to most of White America through the museum and that colonial sensibility that rendered the heritage of another in museum artifacts to be viewed by a discerning public as a way of being 'cultured.'
My how that word has transmogrified over the last century. It went from the halls of academe and the circles of blue bloods to the everyday talk of human uniqueness and difference.
That's the problem I have with using the term "African Americans." I'd rather not relate to someone as a group of people recognized in census sheets, a bubble to darken with graphite or ink. A selection. A false choice. We choose how we can identify ourselves but our bodies speak a fundamental truth of how one perceives your presence. Friend or foe?
Thursday, August 12, 2010
The economy of youtube
The youtube economy, from my craven and over-sexualized perspective, runs on the male gaze. A male-gaze economy powers youtube posts and posters. The comment and rate function of youtube provide a digital-substantial datum, which becomes the machine's way to establish your popularity.
That's the point. Popularity is an abstract concept. It should be. I want to be surprised when I find myself drawn to a personality and I share that preoccupation with others, many many others. The machine has turned this into a likert-type intensity scale representing popularity. The youtubers recognize this and they'll post things just to race the popularity bar. Looking at the number of times one's video is viewed, viewer comments, and current rating comprise popularity. Youtubers also recognizing the ways to 'hack' popularity, and women from adolescence through adulthood show some skin, some leg, some cleavage, mouth, eyeballs, ears, hair, clothing, shapes, sounds. In high definition it takes on a measure of tactility. One poster to a website I frequent recommends watching a video of a girl that she posted in 1080, which is a measure of screen resolution. Screen resolution is how many dots of a light responsive medium per inch cover the screen. In the olden days these were standardized via scan lines. Enterprising girls go for high definition video recorders in order to amplify their presence, and they show some skin, some leg, some cleavage, dancing or lip-syncing prowess, mouth, braces, eyeballs, ears, hair, clothing, shapes, sounds. Most of this is done to copyrighted music produced by a conglomerate of media and marketing companies looking to create a credible platform upon which they can populate a series of products.
A Miley Cyrus product represents a global operation of marketing and machine-made products, transported, and sold to the market comprised mostly of young girls who are enchanted by her. Billions of dollars are expended upon the image pursued in owning the product. This filters through your youtube screen as the prospect of 'making it' via one's youtube video posts motivate the content of the videos. "I have something to show you. I want to show you my presence before you and how 'cool' or 'good' at something I can be. And I want you to rate me on my performance or some little miscellaneous detail that you approved of. I'll do almost anything for your positivity."
I reiterate that a male-gaze economy powers youtube. Through it images become currency. The diversity and character of this gaze is represented in the diversity of videos, which exist currently on youtube. Granted that the sheer mass of any media content in an information based society is already accounted for, we can study this. By addressing the mass of information we read it like tea leaves for poignant signs through which we cast our lot.
Over and over and over again in a self-reflexive world where cameras become mirrors onto the public nature of our everyday lives. Communication, the great leveler, flattens our image qua data to that of a celebrity, and we achieve parity with the famous in an online world. This parity is only an information access accomplishment but it is a powerful motivator for racing fame. Because racing fame is a generator built into the sites that we frequent and the ways that we've conceded to relating to one another.
That's the point. Popularity is an abstract concept. It should be. I want to be surprised when I find myself drawn to a personality and I share that preoccupation with others, many many others. The machine has turned this into a likert-type intensity scale representing popularity. The youtubers recognize this and they'll post things just to race the popularity bar. Looking at the number of times one's video is viewed, viewer comments, and current rating comprise popularity. Youtubers also recognizing the ways to 'hack' popularity, and women from adolescence through adulthood show some skin, some leg, some cleavage, mouth, eyeballs, ears, hair, clothing, shapes, sounds. In high definition it takes on a measure of tactility. One poster to a website I frequent recommends watching a video of a girl that she posted in 1080, which is a measure of screen resolution. Screen resolution is how many dots of a light responsive medium per inch cover the screen. In the olden days these were standardized via scan lines. Enterprising girls go for high definition video recorders in order to amplify their presence, and they show some skin, some leg, some cleavage, dancing or lip-syncing prowess, mouth, braces, eyeballs, ears, hair, clothing, shapes, sounds. Most of this is done to copyrighted music produced by a conglomerate of media and marketing companies looking to create a credible platform upon which they can populate a series of products.
A Miley Cyrus product represents a global operation of marketing and machine-made products, transported, and sold to the market comprised mostly of young girls who are enchanted by her. Billions of dollars are expended upon the image pursued in owning the product. This filters through your youtube screen as the prospect of 'making it' via one's youtube video posts motivate the content of the videos. "I have something to show you. I want to show you my presence before you and how 'cool' or 'good' at something I can be. And I want you to rate me on my performance or some little miscellaneous detail that you approved of. I'll do almost anything for your positivity."
I reiterate that a male-gaze economy powers youtube. Through it images become currency. The diversity and character of this gaze is represented in the diversity of videos, which exist currently on youtube. Granted that the sheer mass of any media content in an information based society is already accounted for, we can study this. By addressing the mass of information we read it like tea leaves for poignant signs through which we cast our lot.
Over and over and over again in a self-reflexive world where cameras become mirrors onto the public nature of our everyday lives. Communication, the great leveler, flattens our image qua data to that of a celebrity, and we achieve parity with the famous in an online world. This parity is only an information access accomplishment but it is a powerful motivator for racing fame. Because racing fame is a generator built into the sites that we frequent and the ways that we've conceded to relating to one another.
The biology we no longer pursue
We no longer study biology. We consider the information content of life and, like diligent librarians, we categorize and locate life in space and time. In understanding life we only add information to the world that becomes the interface point with that life for the majority of us. We ignore the life around us.
Why doesn't biology pursue this?
Nature was ground zero. It's battered remains remind us of the viral relationship neural reflexivity has upon the world. It steps out of the rhythm of life by removing itself from its co-present relationship to it. In doing so it achieves the primal relationship a virus has with the world. The virus seeks opportunities. Like a genetic pirate it seizes the genes of other forms of life in order to have it produce copies of itself. How simple is that? That's a fundamental relationship between a life lived on the outside of a world considered as undifferentiated soup once it had achieved a membrane to separate itself. On the outside. In becoming an 'other' one achieves the fundamental cleavage from which unitary consciousness springs. Difference is the datum. From that everything grows. We achieve scale.
Why doesn't biology pursue this?
Nature was ground zero. It's battered remains remind us of the viral relationship neural reflexivity has upon the world. It steps out of the rhythm of life by removing itself from its co-present relationship to it. In doing so it achieves the primal relationship a virus has with the world. The virus seeks opportunities. Like a genetic pirate it seizes the genes of other forms of life in order to have it produce copies of itself. How simple is that? That's a fundamental relationship between a life lived on the outside of a world considered as undifferentiated soup once it had achieved a membrane to separate itself. On the outside. In becoming an 'other' one achieves the fundamental cleavage from which unitary consciousness springs. Difference is the datum. From that everything grows. We achieve scale.
Scale
Scale is the interface point between the individual and the crowd through media.
Media first and foremost scales the voice. Media then pioneered tele-presence. I'm reading what our current iteration of the web is doing to the individual. So far the individual is being tossed aside for the self as the sum of an interest profile. Yet, we're still dealing with scale.
Media, thought broadly, is the apparatus through which the individual and notions of scale operate. Presence once required the voice, the image, or merely the ideas of the individual. Through media it achieved this.
Cleavage is the orientation of our desire. We seek to breach the gap. One way of accomplishing this is through the media technologies that we use and the ways that we use them.
Mobile devices are the first glimpse at how neatly this desire to breach distance and to achieve an audience is accomplished. It's a concession. We concede to relating to the mass through ourselves as data, ultimately. The reality principle of the medium is the way that medium is built and how that informs the nature of its use and its product.
Scale in the information economy is in the depth of the data profile and the meta-data tag that labels it. Scale is traversing this depth, which conquers distance and time. By coming to presence bodily and with an intact history the media we use accomplish scaling through the elements of familiarity.
I already know you. That's the point of culture.
Streams of our time, our attention, our life passes through a medium. It always has.
The technologies and attitudes that prop up these media should be our concern. It is us after all. I already know you.
Media first and foremost scales the voice. Media then pioneered tele-presence. I'm reading what our current iteration of the web is doing to the individual. So far the individual is being tossed aside for the self as the sum of an interest profile. Yet, we're still dealing with scale.
Media, thought broadly, is the apparatus through which the individual and notions of scale operate. Presence once required the voice, the image, or merely the ideas of the individual. Through media it achieved this.
Cleavage is the orientation of our desire. We seek to breach the gap. One way of accomplishing this is through the media technologies that we use and the ways that we use them.
Mobile devices are the first glimpse at how neatly this desire to breach distance and to achieve an audience is accomplished. It's a concession. We concede to relating to the mass through ourselves as data, ultimately. The reality principle of the medium is the way that medium is built and how that informs the nature of its use and its product.
Scale in the information economy is in the depth of the data profile and the meta-data tag that labels it. Scale is traversing this depth, which conquers distance and time. By coming to presence bodily and with an intact history the media we use accomplish scaling through the elements of familiarity.
I already know you. That's the point of culture.
Streams of our time, our attention, our life passes through a medium. It always has.
The technologies and attitudes that prop up these media should be our concern. It is us after all. I already know you.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Techno-philosophy
I love, hate, leave, and return to Internet based video games, well one. It's a massively multi-player on-line role-playing game (MMORPG) known as World of Warcraft. I knew a group of mostly men who played, so I returned to play with them 3 nights a week, we form the 'guild' called 'Descent.'
I have yet to come to terms with what it means, and I've found my own love-hate relationship to be somewhat schizophrenic. Yet, the complexity of our character does produce some contradictions. Right now, I use my struggle with game mechanics as an opportunity to talk about how I interface with it. I posted the following to their guild forums. A post I made earlier 'e-friendship' was what got this blog rolling again back in November.
Meet Robo-Pfeiffer (Pfeiffer is the name of the character I play. A shadowpriest that I named Pfeiffer):
During our hard-mode attempts in Ulduar we picked up a shaman/hunter with some kind of Russian name. He recommend one of his friends, so we picked him up. That guy was Annesh. Once I actually beat Annesh on the meters. I had the unfair advantage of gear. He was a 10-man geared raider. He was also lagging worse than a satellite feed from Afghanistan. I remember seeing him with his character pointing the opposite way during a VOA25 run prior to entering Ulduar. "Poor guy," I thought. "Maybe I'll share with him my advice," I thought. How naive I was.
Then we took on the Iron Council. Annesh raped me like an altar boy. He was a priest after all. Melk sent me a private message and shared with me his log sharing on the forums about my performance versus that of Annesh. There, with my pants down, was every damn spell I had cast, when I had cast it, and when and if I clipped dots, plus my up-time. I felt a bit foolish. The managers were poring over my work, and I was the focus of their ad-hoc performance review. I learned the importance of mini-maxing, and the equal importance of hacking meters via maintaining a rune-empowered shadow-word pain on each of the Council's Russian sounding, metal members. I also learned that Iamdrunk was a cheap and dirty motherfucker who had absolutely no respect for any man. That's another story.
I threw out Squinky's macro and went back to manual weaving. Manual weaving has its benefits, and I got better at dot maintenance, finding ways to cheat meters, and maybe once or twice more I repaid the favor by playing the priest to Annesh's altar boy.
Once or twice.
I quit the game, and upon coming back I went for the minimax strategy by leveling JC. Now with Mixology and 3 runed Dragon's Eyes I was squeezing out as much extra dps as I could. That wasn't enough. My DPS still lacked. With 4 pieces of sanctified tier 10 I was still putting up mediocre DPS. This time Phrawd had to pull me into a different channel to tell me that on one attempt of heroic 10 man Sindragosa I had posted a meager 1k dps. Yeah, that was bad. I was playing it conservative and was once again caught with my pants down.
I took another look at my DPS, my dot up-time, my spell rotation, and realized something very important. The rhythm of dot maintenance doesn't play a song. It's a flow chart of choices that must be made in real-time and coordinated with fight mechanics, phase changes, the big picture. I have rhythm. I used to breakdance to Thriller when I was 6. My brother and I would choreograph breakdance moves to the synthesizer songs on Van Halen 1984 like one of us was Turbo, the other Special K. That was back when Michael was still black and before his nose became an impressionist drawing. Now he's dead, and buried with him are my brother's and my dreams of breakdancing fame.
I recently gave up. I tried a half a dozen recommended add-ons for tracking dots. None of them felt right. So I returned to Squinky's post for 3.3 macros.
Here is the behemoth that he created.
/castsequence [nochanneling] reset=target/6 devouring plague, vampiric touch, mind blast, mind flay, mind flay, mind flay, mind flay, mind blast, vampiric touch, mind flay, devouring plague, mind flay, mind flay, mind blast, mind flay, vampiric touch, mind flay, mind flay, mind blast, mind flay, mind flay
/cast shadowfiend
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
After I do my initial preparation and cast Shadow Word: Pain I turn to spamming the button for this macro.
Voila.
I did it. Top 3 on Blood Princes.
I feel like a cheat, a loser, a dead beat. I succumbed to the machine by programming my way around its clunky interface of lag times, dot maintenance, phase changes, etc.
I went out to the bar(s) tonight. I had a few drinks, alone. Most of my friends are married or working on establish it via common-law. I was drinking that cheap PBR, listening to Guided By Voices, and watching the Pac Man game play out. There it was again, only in a different form. I was witnessing machine control, voltage control, impedance application, turned into buttons, and knobs for controlling a raster scanned yellow, circular avatar to eat pellets and avoid ghosts. Beer after beer I sat alone and watched that same sequence play out on the table arcade. Pac-man is a finite play field with finite choices that one must make. Thrown in are objects which represent either objectives, bonus points, special conditions, or perils to avoid. While the perils zoom around according to their own algorithm, the operator of Pac-man finds his/her own algorithm and settles into it. The operator establishes a series of implicit boolean statements concerning "if this condition then this action." "Should I eat the cherry jumping around, or will I get trapped between two ghosts?"
I saw a rather illuminating documentary a few years ago: "King of Kong." A man with an apparent OCD and an extremely wide alturistic streak bought the arcade version of Donkey Kong and spent months perfecting his play until he had virtual muscle memory to be able to push the game until it spit its data onto the play field. Among my peers that was called 'flipping the game.' It was the digital counterpart to bumping the pinball game to direct the flow of your circular metal avatar. Putting the game on the ropes was the point. It was the ultimate challenger, and you'd muster all of your attention and patience in mastering the sequence of jumps you'd have to make to achieve the high score. Whether or not you used strategies outside of the game, like bumping the table, didn't matter because what showed of your progress on the screen next to your initials was all that mattered. That mattered outside of the game environment more than the game itself anyway. Games of my dawning consciousness were of that ilk. They were complex, yet finite. Their economics were simple. They established a scrolling complex set of choices thrust at the avatar, which became increasingly complex until the player's avatar had expended its last life. The balance in a game like this was to keep the player's attention and interest long enough to justify their quarter spent while ensuring that the increasing toughness of the game would keep quarters entering at a rate that couldn't be overshot by the extended play time of the virtuosos, the Anneshes of that game environment. The ingenious or the obsessive-compulsive ratmen who would find ways to play Defender for 7 hours straight were the stuff of legend among the gamers in the early 1980s. They gained notoriety as masters of their game. The news of course would lampoon them as the dupes of the gaming industry that only wanted their quarters or use their obsessive habits as the moral panic that this technology signified to the parents.
Why did I go here? I'm not a virtuoso violinist, but I see the connection clearer and clearer. The Paganinis of our time have 97% dot uptime on multiple targets. Their wow logs are the stuff of legend. I find the engineer who deconstructs this ingenuity into a spell cast sequence that establishes the best results, and I adopt it. It's a single button. I was good at beating Asteroids as a kid by spinning and mashing the 'shoot' button as fast as I could. Cockroach reflexes, that was my claim to fame. I've caught many a falling glass, potted plant, by way of those reflexes. I can mash Squinky's macro as fast as can be registered. I'm playing the game better now because I can play through his macro, his spell sequence, his decision tree for maximum DPS. I mash the number 4 button like a boss, and voila. It's like Annesh was never here to challenge me, but what it does do is reduce my play to gear and gear alone when comparing my play to that of another who relies on this macro. Yes, it takes some of the fun and mystery out of the game. Hell, it alienates me from the class mechanics that those slot-machine minded programmers gave to shadowpriests. But as long as my pointer finger doesn't fall off from repeated whackings of number 4, expect me to put up numbers worthy of my gear. I've found a way to maximize dps. I'm robo-pfieffer. Insult me. I will not cry. Punch me. I will not bruise. Ignore me. My blinking lights will not change. I am the lie that you think is my own ability to play the game. I'll keep hacking meters for the sake of performance measures. That's the point anyway. I just regret that I couldn't do it by my own ingenuity. I am the outcome of my choice to use this macro. I am robo-pfieffer.
Beep.
Beep.
I have yet to come to terms with what it means, and I've found my own love-hate relationship to be somewhat schizophrenic. Yet, the complexity of our character does produce some contradictions. Right now, I use my struggle with game mechanics as an opportunity to talk about how I interface with it. I posted the following to their guild forums. A post I made earlier 'e-friendship' was what got this blog rolling again back in November.
Meet Robo-Pfeiffer (Pfeiffer is the name of the character I play. A shadowpriest that I named Pfeiffer):
During our hard-mode attempts in Ulduar we picked up a shaman/hunter with some kind of Russian name. He recommend one of his friends, so we picked him up. That guy was Annesh. Once I actually beat Annesh on the meters. I had the unfair advantage of gear. He was a 10-man geared raider. He was also lagging worse than a satellite feed from Afghanistan. I remember seeing him with his character pointing the opposite way during a VOA25 run prior to entering Ulduar. "Poor guy," I thought. "Maybe I'll share with him my advice," I thought. How naive I was.
Then we took on the Iron Council. Annesh raped me like an altar boy. He was a priest after all. Melk sent me a private message and shared with me his log sharing on the forums about my performance versus that of Annesh. There, with my pants down, was every damn spell I had cast, when I had cast it, and when and if I clipped dots, plus my up-time. I felt a bit foolish. The managers were poring over my work, and I was the focus of their ad-hoc performance review. I learned the importance of mini-maxing, and the equal importance of hacking meters via maintaining a rune-empowered shadow-word pain on each of the Council's Russian sounding, metal members. I also learned that Iamdrunk was a cheap and dirty motherfucker who had absolutely no respect for any man. That's another story.
I threw out Squinky's macro and went back to manual weaving. Manual weaving has its benefits, and I got better at dot maintenance, finding ways to cheat meters, and maybe once or twice more I repaid the favor by playing the priest to Annesh's altar boy.
Once or twice.
I quit the game, and upon coming back I went for the minimax strategy by leveling JC. Now with Mixology and 3 runed Dragon's Eyes I was squeezing out as much extra dps as I could. That wasn't enough. My DPS still lacked. With 4 pieces of sanctified tier 10 I was still putting up mediocre DPS. This time Phrawd had to pull me into a different channel to tell me that on one attempt of heroic 10 man Sindragosa I had posted a meager 1k dps. Yeah, that was bad. I was playing it conservative and was once again caught with my pants down.
I took another look at my DPS, my dot up-time, my spell rotation, and realized something very important. The rhythm of dot maintenance doesn't play a song. It's a flow chart of choices that must be made in real-time and coordinated with fight mechanics, phase changes, the big picture. I have rhythm. I used to breakdance to Thriller when I was 6. My brother and I would choreograph breakdance moves to the synthesizer songs on Van Halen 1984 like one of us was Turbo, the other Special K. That was back when Michael was still black and before his nose became an impressionist drawing. Now he's dead, and buried with him are my brother's and my dreams of breakdancing fame.
I recently gave up. I tried a half a dozen recommended add-ons for tracking dots. None of them felt right. So I returned to Squinky's post for 3.3 macros.
Here is the behemoth that he created.
/castsequence [nochanneling] reset=target/6 devouring plague, vampiric touch, mind blast, mind flay, mind flay, mind flay, mind flay, mind blast, vampiric touch, mind flay, devouring plague, mind flay, mind flay, mind blast, mind flay, vampiric touch, mind flay, mind flay, mind blast, mind flay, mind flay
/cast shadowfiend
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
After I do my initial preparation and cast Shadow Word: Pain I turn to spamming the button for this macro.
Voila.
I did it. Top 3 on Blood Princes.
I feel like a cheat, a loser, a dead beat. I succumbed to the machine by programming my way around its clunky interface of lag times, dot maintenance, phase changes, etc.
I went out to the bar(s) tonight. I had a few drinks, alone. Most of my friends are married or working on establish it via common-law. I was drinking that cheap PBR, listening to Guided By Voices, and watching the Pac Man game play out. There it was again, only in a different form. I was witnessing machine control, voltage control, impedance application, turned into buttons, and knobs for controlling a raster scanned yellow, circular avatar to eat pellets and avoid ghosts. Beer after beer I sat alone and watched that same sequence play out on the table arcade. Pac-man is a finite play field with finite choices that one must make. Thrown in are objects which represent either objectives, bonus points, special conditions, or perils to avoid. While the perils zoom around according to their own algorithm, the operator of Pac-man finds his/her own algorithm and settles into it. The operator establishes a series of implicit boolean statements concerning "if this condition then this action." "Should I eat the cherry jumping around, or will I get trapped between two ghosts?"
I saw a rather illuminating documentary a few years ago: "King of Kong." A man with an apparent OCD and an extremely wide alturistic streak bought the arcade version of Donkey Kong and spent months perfecting his play until he had virtual muscle memory to be able to push the game until it spit its data onto the play field. Among my peers that was called 'flipping the game.' It was the digital counterpart to bumping the pinball game to direct the flow of your circular metal avatar. Putting the game on the ropes was the point. It was the ultimate challenger, and you'd muster all of your attention and patience in mastering the sequence of jumps you'd have to make to achieve the high score. Whether or not you used strategies outside of the game, like bumping the table, didn't matter because what showed of your progress on the screen next to your initials was all that mattered. That mattered outside of the game environment more than the game itself anyway. Games of my dawning consciousness were of that ilk. They were complex, yet finite. Their economics were simple. They established a scrolling complex set of choices thrust at the avatar, which became increasingly complex until the player's avatar had expended its last life. The balance in a game like this was to keep the player's attention and interest long enough to justify their quarter spent while ensuring that the increasing toughness of the game would keep quarters entering at a rate that couldn't be overshot by the extended play time of the virtuosos, the Anneshes of that game environment. The ingenious or the obsessive-compulsive ratmen who would find ways to play Defender for 7 hours straight were the stuff of legend among the gamers in the early 1980s. They gained notoriety as masters of their game. The news of course would lampoon them as the dupes of the gaming industry that only wanted their quarters or use their obsessive habits as the moral panic that this technology signified to the parents.
Why did I go here? I'm not a virtuoso violinist, but I see the connection clearer and clearer. The Paganinis of our time have 97% dot uptime on multiple targets. Their wow logs are the stuff of legend. I find the engineer who deconstructs this ingenuity into a spell cast sequence that establishes the best results, and I adopt it. It's a single button. I was good at beating Asteroids as a kid by spinning and mashing the 'shoot' button as fast as I could. Cockroach reflexes, that was my claim to fame. I've caught many a falling glass, potted plant, by way of those reflexes. I can mash Squinky's macro as fast as can be registered. I'm playing the game better now because I can play through his macro, his spell sequence, his decision tree for maximum DPS. I mash the number 4 button like a boss, and voila. It's like Annesh was never here to challenge me, but what it does do is reduce my play to gear and gear alone when comparing my play to that of another who relies on this macro. Yes, it takes some of the fun and mystery out of the game. Hell, it alienates me from the class mechanics that those slot-machine minded programmers gave to shadowpriests. But as long as my pointer finger doesn't fall off from repeated whackings of number 4, expect me to put up numbers worthy of my gear. I've found a way to maximize dps. I'm robo-pfieffer. Insult me. I will not cry. Punch me. I will not bruise. Ignore me. My blinking lights will not change. I am the lie that you think is my own ability to play the game. I'll keep hacking meters for the sake of performance measures. That's the point anyway. I just regret that I couldn't do it by my own ingenuity. I am the outcome of my choice to use this macro. I am robo-pfieffer.
Beep.
Beep.
Notes on Big Body
Big Body is society, its infrastructure, the habits of mind, and the broad strokes of human action that define its ebb and its flow.
Big Body is merely a concept for all the concrete, rebar, plumbing, wires, and other sundry elements that comprise a functioning society's substantive framework. It is the Big Body for it is both the body, the meat, the substance of societal workings and it is the projection for the individual. As the house is a projective body for the family dwelling within it, Big Body serves as the dwelling space for society.
I came upon this idea in my many drives to and from school. I saw a building that I called the last remaining bit of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project built in St. Louis in the 1960s. That was a failed experiment in housing African Americans. Its residents took advantage of the space, ripping out all that was worth something and scrapping it. The density of the project also led many an enterprising resident to prey upon the more hapless residents. It was demolished after its brief tenure. It was a failed social experiment. The idea came from the stripping of the housing projects infrastructure, its plumbing, for scrap, which gave me the idea for Big Body. Big Body is merely a concept, an idea, a focal point for attending to the ways that people use their body not as labor per se but as product to be sold. People sell blood. People sell eggs. People sell sperm. People sell hair. People sell plasma. And people donate their bodies to science and to medicine for use in others. Science has rendered the body a site for consumption. And so the big buildings also present themselves as bodies to be harvested as well to the enterprising who see not a dwelling but an opportunity to seize.
That's all fine and dandy but to make this idea sing, to make it work conceptually one has to flesh it out analytically. I see Big Body as an evolving work. The past 200 years have seen the city become the focal point for dense dwelling. As such it became the problem of density that must be solved. Waste removal, water, heating, electricity, basic safety, health codes, and the like were ways of solving the problems that come with dense dwelling. So many bodies huddled into orderly spaces is an accomplishment of the modern city. Out of this, Big Body takes shape. As we've entered the 20th century, electricity and the telephone emerge. In its train follow radio and television. The next wave is the Internet and the continual remediation of past forms of communication through digital channels and the many companies seeking to set its standards. Taken as a whole we are witnessing the emergence of a true nervous system for Big Body. The epochal shifts in the evolution of Big Body also focus on shifts in individual relations between the little, personal bodies and our understanding of them plus how our little, personal bodies relate to others. The pathologies of our times perhaps find a connection within the changes and developments of Big Body. This is a work in progress.
I like the idea of Big Body. It has a certain sci-fi flair to it much like Big Brother. Big Body is merely the substance of our relations. The brief past echo and the built future upon which our bodies will interface. The life giving water that we drink passes first through Big Body. Our waste is carted away, distributed, and treated through Big Body. Features of our universal rights as humans, the things taken for granted, are the substance of Big Body as well. Recently, access to the World Wide Web was added to the United Nation's list of basic human rights. That is an outcome of human activity, human retooling, human remediation of Big Body. Most of what we write, see, read, and share pass through the copper cables laid at the beginning of the 20th century and maintained through this century. Big Body is our relation to the most intimate space and the most public space. People eat, shit, drink, sleep, and weep in and upon the surfaces of Big Body. Some prefer to do it behind a door. Others do it among others. How each of us navigates these realms, adds significance or none to them, and how individuals must contend with the uses to which Big Body is put but their little bodies among the constant traffic of humans punctuates psychology and its many pathologies. Paruresis, psychogenic urinary retention, is but one example of how contending with Big Body as a little body crops up. The public excretion avoidant and its opposite, the person who leaves shit in the toilet and on its walls or urinates in inappropriate places comprise the ways that Big Body affords opportunities for pathologies and socially inappropriate behaviors to emerge.
Notes on Big Body run much the way of how technology pundits describe standards and innovation. Big Body is the built environment. Into it we are born. The residue of our time spent among it is left in the names scratched into pavement, spray point on the walls. These isolated vignettes are but one way that the built environment is repurposed. These may provide fodder for the glass half full crowd. For the glass half empty crowd the built environment is a reality with which we must contend. Ultimately, this built environment is a limiting condition for the full and flowering potential of human expression. We see this in the ways that copper wire limits communication. We see this in the ways that our desire for cars congests cities. We see this in the ways our time gets wasted in traffic and in transit to and from locations. We also see this in the ways that telework enables us to avoid this, but also avoid most of the human relations that once punctuated our lives. The litany of pros and cons is not dissimilar to the usual techno-pundits' laundry list. To differentiate Big Body from the pack is to hone in on the interface and the pathologies it produces. Big Body is about finding ways to reconcile individuality with socialilty, to fulfill the needs of individuals both bodily and mentally while fulfilling the basic needs of a functioning and efficient dense-living social organism. The television images of cities from the 1960s through the 1980s plays out in my mind as I try to see Big Body. Koyaanisqatsi comes to mind. There the metaphor of the small, the electronic, the body, and society all came together. Circuit boards and cities find similarities. Traffic and circulatory systems find similarities. Also, the hubris that succeeding in bringing so much human potential together spins out in the end to remind us that no matter how much we can project progress and futurity upon the modern city as a trope we have not left the little fishing village, the little pastoral community behind. The thousands of years we spent following animal herds as opportunistic hunters is the in-built obsolescence of human social behavior that must be relegated to the Id in our Victorian blueprint for modern society. That's it.
Big Body is how past, present, and futurity coalesce in the built and lived-upon framework of society. While one could read this from that art-house flick. Big Body merely puts some academic dressing upon it.
These are my notes upon Big body. More to come I hope.
Big Body is merely a concept for all the concrete, rebar, plumbing, wires, and other sundry elements that comprise a functioning society's substantive framework. It is the Big Body for it is both the body, the meat, the substance of societal workings and it is the projection for the individual. As the house is a projective body for the family dwelling within it, Big Body serves as the dwelling space for society.
I came upon this idea in my many drives to and from school. I saw a building that I called the last remaining bit of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project built in St. Louis in the 1960s. That was a failed experiment in housing African Americans. Its residents took advantage of the space, ripping out all that was worth something and scrapping it. The density of the project also led many an enterprising resident to prey upon the more hapless residents. It was demolished after its brief tenure. It was a failed social experiment. The idea came from the stripping of the housing projects infrastructure, its plumbing, for scrap, which gave me the idea for Big Body. Big Body is merely a concept, an idea, a focal point for attending to the ways that people use their body not as labor per se but as product to be sold. People sell blood. People sell eggs. People sell sperm. People sell hair. People sell plasma. And people donate their bodies to science and to medicine for use in others. Science has rendered the body a site for consumption. And so the big buildings also present themselves as bodies to be harvested as well to the enterprising who see not a dwelling but an opportunity to seize.
That's all fine and dandy but to make this idea sing, to make it work conceptually one has to flesh it out analytically. I see Big Body as an evolving work. The past 200 years have seen the city become the focal point for dense dwelling. As such it became the problem of density that must be solved. Waste removal, water, heating, electricity, basic safety, health codes, and the like were ways of solving the problems that come with dense dwelling. So many bodies huddled into orderly spaces is an accomplishment of the modern city. Out of this, Big Body takes shape. As we've entered the 20th century, electricity and the telephone emerge. In its train follow radio and television. The next wave is the Internet and the continual remediation of past forms of communication through digital channels and the many companies seeking to set its standards. Taken as a whole we are witnessing the emergence of a true nervous system for Big Body. The epochal shifts in the evolution of Big Body also focus on shifts in individual relations between the little, personal bodies and our understanding of them plus how our little, personal bodies relate to others. The pathologies of our times perhaps find a connection within the changes and developments of Big Body. This is a work in progress.
I like the idea of Big Body. It has a certain sci-fi flair to it much like Big Brother. Big Body is merely the substance of our relations. The brief past echo and the built future upon which our bodies will interface. The life giving water that we drink passes first through Big Body. Our waste is carted away, distributed, and treated through Big Body. Features of our universal rights as humans, the things taken for granted, are the substance of Big Body as well. Recently, access to the World Wide Web was added to the United Nation's list of basic human rights. That is an outcome of human activity, human retooling, human remediation of Big Body. Most of what we write, see, read, and share pass through the copper cables laid at the beginning of the 20th century and maintained through this century. Big Body is our relation to the most intimate space and the most public space. People eat, shit, drink, sleep, and weep in and upon the surfaces of Big Body. Some prefer to do it behind a door. Others do it among others. How each of us navigates these realms, adds significance or none to them, and how individuals must contend with the uses to which Big Body is put but their little bodies among the constant traffic of humans punctuates psychology and its many pathologies. Paruresis, psychogenic urinary retention, is but one example of how contending with Big Body as a little body crops up. The public excretion avoidant and its opposite, the person who leaves shit in the toilet and on its walls or urinates in inappropriate places comprise the ways that Big Body affords opportunities for pathologies and socially inappropriate behaviors to emerge.
Notes on Big Body run much the way of how technology pundits describe standards and innovation. Big Body is the built environment. Into it we are born. The residue of our time spent among it is left in the names scratched into pavement, spray point on the walls. These isolated vignettes are but one way that the built environment is repurposed. These may provide fodder for the glass half full crowd. For the glass half empty crowd the built environment is a reality with which we must contend. Ultimately, this built environment is a limiting condition for the full and flowering potential of human expression. We see this in the ways that copper wire limits communication. We see this in the ways that our desire for cars congests cities. We see this in the ways our time gets wasted in traffic and in transit to and from locations. We also see this in the ways that telework enables us to avoid this, but also avoid most of the human relations that once punctuated our lives. The litany of pros and cons is not dissimilar to the usual techno-pundits' laundry list. To differentiate Big Body from the pack is to hone in on the interface and the pathologies it produces. Big Body is about finding ways to reconcile individuality with socialilty, to fulfill the needs of individuals both bodily and mentally while fulfilling the basic needs of a functioning and efficient dense-living social organism. The television images of cities from the 1960s through the 1980s plays out in my mind as I try to see Big Body. Koyaanisqatsi comes to mind. There the metaphor of the small, the electronic, the body, and society all came together. Circuit boards and cities find similarities. Traffic and circulatory systems find similarities. Also, the hubris that succeeding in bringing so much human potential together spins out in the end to remind us that no matter how much we can project progress and futurity upon the modern city as a trope we have not left the little fishing village, the little pastoral community behind. The thousands of years we spent following animal herds as opportunistic hunters is the in-built obsolescence of human social behavior that must be relegated to the Id in our Victorian blueprint for modern society. That's it.
Big Body is how past, present, and futurity coalesce in the built and lived-upon framework of society. While one could read this from that art-house flick. Big Body merely puts some academic dressing upon it.
These are my notes upon Big body. More to come I hope.
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