NOTICE: KRISTINE is still in the planning stage. At the moment it's nothing more (or less) than a 'download zone'.
NOOT: KRISTINE zit nog in de planningsfaze. Op dit ogenblik is het niet meer (of minder) dan een zgn. 'downloadzone' .

Better Cathedral Masonry:

...a prisoner of my own device, i don't get out much but here's what i did see & thought was worthy of your attention
-the placing order is largely chronological in what i 'discover',
- although i tend to replace things i snobbily cannot agree with anymore
- Belgian sites have the promotional advantage
- webmasters of included sites can drop me a note if the site's homepage has changed significantly: dv@nkdee.be) ...

Apart from my personal favorites you might want to look here for interesting work:

 

 

" Avec comme pour langage
Rien qu’un battement aux cieux
Le futur vers se dégage
Du logis très précieux"

S. Mallarmé, ÉVENTAIL de Madame Mallarmé

... explore these bleeding wounds. a note on Sondheim (fading, exploding, fading)...

One of the more ambitious stuff going on in my shaky Cathedral is the attempt to formulate answers to analyses like the one from Alan Sondheim below (see http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt/net4.txt for the complete source text).

'Answers' is a bad word, however, it's more a matter of writing into this kind of text floating on the dim moonlit field where art meets with philosophy on a common ground of howling fear and throws its inward gaze back onto society, deflecting despair from the individual to the unresponsive dull mass of internet text users, a mass that is largely fictional, because next to nothing 'published' this way is actually being read by anyone. The availability of text that used to be decisive for its economic value has gone from utter deflation to denial, every text adding to the postponement of the available corpus, so that as a risidual 'author ' your last stand can only be to resist processing by proceduralising the writing process, creating floating text on top of disappearances, REWRITING those until you let them sink to/as another full fathom five.

Pollock - Full Fathom Five 1947

A question, rather, of materialising on absent readership through vanishing authorship (absent readership, not in the 'traditional' absence-presence of the reader to text relation, but a critical 'actual' absence, because

1. text on the internet remains to a large extent unwritten until it is printed, or till the industry finally comes up with a 'materialising' screen rendering, visualising the traumatic aspects of text in an efficient way,
2. so far webtext is only visible in an eternal suspension, a provisional context, a namespace liable to be disrupted at any time, not only because servers can go down creating incidents of disruption, but the whole namespace, its number to text registration, the URL, a basic economic contract, can end abruptly at any time for any reason beyond the control of the author (you can 'Save' the text but where do you save it to if not to another, local and more controllable(?) network and a saved version is by its nature not identical to the published version in the way a deposited book is identical to its act of publication, an act along lines through these fields
   1. at the same time of course the garantuees offered by the printed book are both corrupted and undermined in their quasi stable economic-academic-artistic status in an increasing manner by the publication of their electronic counterparts and by our commercial machinery taking over the power of selection (attribution of value) and inscribing the published text with its editorial sine-qua-nons
   2. (corrupting the inner voices of the authors into obedience, authors that are
      1. blind followers of fashion in most cases,
      2. unconscious victims of the N'th Commandment (the 'Thou shalt NOT WRITE THUS or THUS or...' emanating from an invisible instance of the Logic of Commercial Value, invisible because it's being updated with every new publication) in some cases where encapsulation occurs on terms beyond the author's scope,
      3. or in some extremely rare cases where the author is aware of her texts being victimised but nevertheless succeeds in (temporarily) escaping the encapsulating process in a subvertive, initially successful and ultimately suicidal attempt to maintain speed while jumping from the plane
      4. or marginalising the text through publication in the economically irrelevant areas such as the bibliophile publication, the specialised academic press, the publication on special occasion where you cannot even buy it anymore, you need to be part of the circle where it will be given to you, a message from yourself as a social being to yourself as a reading machine. This is of course the P2P (person-to-person) process defined in a negative way, a positive approach (choose P2P instead of being coerced into it) would according to Michel Bauwens be an escape route from the dilemma
   3. thus efficiently creating an apory, an inpenetrable wall around its absent corpus of 'the Published' in so much as to effectively deny access to any reader, including the author and strengthened by the fears of the other media (the sound/video/software industry in which the text publishing industry is thoroughly embedded) getting more and more in a paranoid state and using all of its power to enforce that power judicially, preferably even at the core of its own problematisation, the tools with which its imbalance is being created, the spreading of Open Source Software, and now violently seeking 'justice' through the inscription of a software patent in the EU
3. because the medium itself hoaxes its 'users' into consuming text, clicking and sucking it in as a liquid, a visual hybrid that loses or even contradicts the inner voice of the author, webtext is embedded in a network that is driven by commercially inspired usability, dictating the style, content and above all the length of the text.
   
   Any text that doesn't adhere to these princibles of usability will automatically be disgarded, unless it is being supra-inscribed by supplements of economic value, linked by institutions that can hand out the garantueed number of visitors so that in the end some poor sod is actually forced to read through the text because it needs to be reviewed according to its status of hits. Or it will be read in a manner and in the circumstances NOTWITHSTANDING its presence in this context, which of course makes for a world of difference in the reading process. Anyone who has come this far in reading this text, has 'come a long way' in her struggle for emancipation from those condemned to blindly consume and, as i claimed in an earlier draft of this process, is declared dead by the producing industry (it doesn't matter what you buy, you're outnumbered, it doesn't matter what you say unless you say it in a way we can make profit from).
   It should be clear by now that you are still part of the we i emphasized, it's just that you ( and i) are dead skin. Dead skin has nowhere to go (apart from going camping for the rest of your life in the desert), and, moreover, the system has in as much become selfaware that it knows it needs dead skin for protection, so it tries to 'incorporate' as much of it as it can, going berserk in its quasi random testing of artistic fishing fields to catch and cook a Big One (1), to create new hypes on. The best thing an artist can do these days to garantuee herself economic success is sit tight, don't move, just wiggle your tails & toes a lot and patiently wait for the fishing hook, maximize the profit from the 12,5 minutes, sorry, that is 6,25 minutes by now, you'll have while being cooked and served. In a similar fashion the same publishing sytem is going through the entire history of human cultural production, creating, in collaboration or in emulation of the film industry, substantial fashions of invisible bodies (corpi) of texts like 'The Medieval', 'Egypt' , 'New Science', 'The Prehistoric', 'Classical Music', 'The Body' and enforcing those on the public by making them promotional supplements of what is still considered as the Press in its old framing of journalism, keeping up the rhetoric of its freedom and independance for the sole sake of its valuable identity, an identity that is used as trading ground for the acquisition of advertising contracts, and on that ground liable to be gradually desintegrated, a slow but inevitable process; you can/could hear the screams of denial and mortal agony in editorials of papers who haven't yet come to terms with that.
4. "Crisis- nothing that so nice is, like" a pop song i remember now, don't know who from, late eighties i think

she herself an instance of vanishing authorship, on the brink of losing her touch 'n feel of the word itself, of the flow that language was before she hacked into this stream of unconsciousness, plugged herself into the mediating apparatus that allows her to spit it out at formerly unknown speeds), throwing the linking-fading-exploding-fading-linking machine forward from an installment, an instance of temporary arrest, of banking 'gained' points in a game of the weakest link brought live on the net, that is at the same time a sign of its own deficit, throwing it away from the freezing body into a haltering rhythm someone else might sing to, or curse in, dance to, scream at...

There's a lot in that text that i can agree to, if you want opinions, it's mainly the basic concept of GRANULARITY
that i must (also & repeatedly, beyond its repudiation by its REWRITING subject, before the text was written, granulated, after it was postponed, annihilated by its appearance at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt/net4.txt , framed by THIS text, a jsp included COPY referring to an act of misreading the impossible appearance of an outdated text by my act of opening a REMOTE file, untsoweiter) refuse. Granularity is a regression to a primal but fictional atomism that can be avoided. 'Fictional', to be understood as any human act of representation or of perception itself, fiction as that process that we actually need to deal with the real to avoid the abyss of reality itself. Human mind cannot bear very much reality (Eliot), so the atomism itself is a primal need of humans, but in our human state of being we constantly deny it as well, as our desire is towards a complete annihilation of fiction and thus of any refraining concept of atoms or grains or points or whatever you want to name the singularity. We need singularity, because that's how our brains work, much like we need(ed) gods or Lacanian Objects, we construct singularity from the absence of it, create it by being here. So it's there all right, and at the same time it cannot be there, because that would immediately lead to global arrest, an instantaneaous fixation of reality, or, as Sondheim suggests here, a rewrite of the same into the same. We have nothing to write but that which we write into. There is no text beyond the text we live in.

This may all be going beyond an ontological or philosophical point of discussion, because there are lots of things that suggest that in ways similar to our recently discovered ability to destroy the physical earth (Hiroshima-denial of pending eco disasters) or simply the scale of effect a 'slight' carelessness on the part of our entrusted worldly powers can have (oops Bophal, 'xcuse me Tsjernobyl, you were saying Rwanda?) we are now becoming capable of creating networks of distributed 'intelligent' computing that could effectively disrupt reality as we know it on a global scale and rule out any 'normal' process of human perception, leaving us in a black hole in the great void.

Optimists tend to fill this void with projections of better futures, in fact the other day i found a copy of a leading scientist's doctoral thesis in a second hand shop, bluntly autographed with the words "The only history that interests us is the history of the future". It doesn't matter who that scientist is, suffice it to say that it's someone in a position to pour substantial amounts of corporate money into what used to be respectable scientific research. What does matter is his reference to an 'us' that justifies his bluntness, taking the reader of this dedication into a thrusted circle of "those who are enlightened". Even if that 'us' only existed in his overenthusiastic, self-indulgent prickness or in the paranoid minds of folk like the three hackers in the X-Files, the threat is symptomatically a clear and present danger.

Our world as we have built it is perhaps blindly sliding down the path of the Great Modernistic Project led by such peoplewho are in awe of the sudden (although predictable) advancements in their fields. These people seem to think the whole revolution is all of their own genious doing, believing the earth was inhabitated by ill-trained and dark-brained barbarians before they or their tutors came along. For anyone who cares not to dismiss the entire human history for a moment, those Modernist schemes are more likely to turn into distopian nightmares, an unacceptable choice between either the zero of a finite silence (Beckett) or the big 1 containing all and therefore nothing (Joyce).

Once you start tampering with ontology itself you should be aware of what you're getting into ( the Zeus project for instance is one of those areas where business logic threatens to invade reality, it's all 'Open Source', mind you and no-one seems to know or care what they are plugging into which machine, no-one is worried by the idea of an ontology, however primitive in its conception, gaining dominance and therefore arresting power (define your freedom as we do, or die) by it's allegiance to the very core of business activity).

Sure it's harmless. Sure it's 'only' about business communication, application 'integration'. Naturally we only 'call' it 'ontology'. No we have no 'ambition' whatsoever of 'defining' language, it's 'only' a matter of machine 'readability'. 'The' 'only' 'history' 'that' 'interests' 'us' ',' 'is' 'the' 'history' 'of' 'the''future''.'

It doesn't help much if you act like lots of these scientists do, negate everything before or after Nicolai Hartman because it's of no immediate use (they can see) and go on from there because you are evidently succesful. Of course ontologies on a strictly logical calculus work better and faster, mathematics was doing pretty well too till Gödel and Russell came along, so on our way out let's quietly dump all those awkward quantum incertainties as well, shall we?

The reactionist declaration of intent of the Mitteleuropa Foundation at http://www.mitteleuropafoundation.it says it all:

"A research-center in cognitive systems and ontology. Our guiding idea is that theories developed between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th in the area we may broadly term "Mitteleuropean" could offer positive hints to the development of contemporary science."

The fact alone that they need it to be Mitteleuropean. Comfortably tucked away in an old monastery, their intentions are clear enough: anything written in any fashion identifyable with French Post-Modernism is of no use whatsoever and should be kept from the premisses at all costs. Derrida's probably the worst virus imaginable. We need dollars, no revelations. Do not look at anything older than 1850, you don't really believe there can be anything of use in quaint old Leibniz, now do you? We are talking ontology here, not mythology. How do you expect me to run an institution on monads? Or nomads for that matter? It's maths here, not mads. Untsoweiter...

The only thing this website reminded me of is the way young Dutch poets (I only know about that language, I'm sure similar things happen in other literatures) started writing unbelievable 19th century rhetoric lyrics a few years ago, doing away with all that nastiness from modernism and post-modernism, cultivating a non-existent corpus of dogmatic rules. If you'd write anything pointing out what they were doing they would get excessively mad, with we-don't-want-to-hear-it-go-away-or-we-will-beat-you-out-of-here.

Or the way some painting schools (literally: training schools) deify late 19th century realistic bourgeois painting, a similar reaction of reverting and denying everything that happened in between.

And of course such ontologies can almost effortlessly (3 to 5 years, starting last year, not even that many buckets of dollars required if you get your talent cheap in the east) be brought to rule the world ('rule' in both it's governmental meanings, setting out and being the mental rule), and 'naturally' object- oriented software programming is the way to go if you need fast successes.

It's rather the question if humanity needs that kind of success and if, indeed, that great Beyond is not a place where we are banned from for a reason, reminded of ad nauseam by a holocoust and countless genocides to get away from, a pre-human writing on that blemished wall inside that thick skull of ours. What we urgently need is perhaps more an ontology for engineers that relates to them in understandable terms of 'best practices' what they are in fact doing in an ethical perspective, or more effectively, what they are bringing down upon themselves. Or should i be singing the joy of accomplishment here? Drive my bike through the living room and cry out triumphantly 'look mummy, no hands!'. Trust the clever people with the power and the money to show it? I am stupid, and like any self-respecting artist slightly deranged, i admit it freely, but not that stupid, nor an utter crank. Code is text, many people dealing with code don't even realize that, and if the IT business academics want to abolish history how could they realize the true power of text, once unleashed, like they "Unleash" all those thick useless Bibles on a new programming language every five years, because the old ones have become too complex for youngsters to learn in 24 hours, and therefore economically inefficient. Recycling is for assholes, let's dump that shit, we _are_ history. Eschatologically alright.

What i can think of in my ignorance, positively: I consider Derrida's research into negative theology a very interesting escape route here and the Deleuzian Leibniz rewrite a good starting point of fabricating alternatives to the dominant logistic ontology approach.. I hate to use the word but a minimalistic deconstruction of the current programming paradigms, the text we feed our machines with, can be manufactured relatively easily, it wouldn't 'do' much but demonstrate that it can be done, but results may come equally spectacular when sufficient resources are applied to such processes. It's a question of finding a singular impossibility, an example that proves beyond doubt that just by using a different ontology and applying that to another set of semantics, you can create something that is not within the scope of infant Zeus and the likes.

A nice grail to be hunting down after hours, so in a way you could say that, like for any artist who is serious about her business, saving the world is a harmless hobby i like very much or a nice side effect of my symptomatic 'convoluted' condition and the obscure poetry with its idiosyncratic and eschatological tendencies that condition creates with or without my consent. No need to lose one's sense of humour, is there?

More than worth a serious look at is Michel Bauwens' writing on a P2P way out towards a new integrative approach at http://noosphere.cc/.

Or to slip out another back door: in the end it's perhaps a good thing that there are so many hackers around, only it would be better if a few thousands of those started hacking into ontology, break into the fabrics of semantic webs and leave some of their own cobwebs, reminding some people metaphorically of their inevitable abdication and subsequent demise in the future of their history.

It's all just another code, really, only too bad much of the goodies is in French or German only (you don't go 'n translate your cool Linux stuff to windoze and let everything get corrupted, now do ya?), but that could be part of the challenge.

Now leave me, you have not read this, i do not exist, i want to write some outdated poetry now in your absence, for another non-existence, neither of us in need of being right about anything

Last update 15/08/2005 23:11 GMT+2

HERE's the Alan Sondheim text, from internet_txt4 @ http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt/net4.txt

WROET

Gebruiksaanwijzing voor Belgische Lichamen #4

(post-werkweekse synopsis i.s.m. Hendrik Marsman)

(Wijs niet naar de grond of hij
verstijft onmiddelijk, altijd al
een bleke aal moderniteit, diep
door Hollandsheid versteven.)

Je ogen vermoed ik paarsgewijs met eindjes
pretkabel bestoken. Het
is nacht, de hemel zit potdicht,
niemand ziet je, niet eens ik,
een ptyx die klaarheid roept
in 't dichte veld betekenix. Herinnering. Ga,

had ze gezegd - zich in het gestoelte
een schouder ontblotend zodat her & der
een schaap verschroeide - ga & breng
mij de blauwe muren van het licht. Je
aarzelde. Wèg hand. Ga & breng mij
de zingende vlam in het hart
van de zon. Je stamelde. Wèg
andere hand. Ga, begon ze weer,

maar je strompelde al de schuur
uit, spuwde je bijtende zuur in het rijk
der drie potentaten, zaaide tweedracht
& kant onder de goden & zette alles
beamend in alles weer om. Je offerde
je kruis, het stonk naar zee & zonk.

Hoor mij in zijn tempel waren: wijsmuis,
kletterhand, die akke bril & vlezige
glasbrand waar het kaalt. Het is nacht, wat
had je gedacht. De hemel zit potdicht,
perslucht onder plakken afslagwolk. 1 van twee
vogels stort telkens hetzelfde eigeel in, het mondiale
ploeterbad behelst geen vin. Het is als

met haar als
meteen gedaan,

ik val
haar na
haar nada-
verende val
ik & vloei
uit/in, waai/o
een bekken
met een lus
naar mij erin.

Wroet in mij,
o <%=ipnr%>:
maak je handen
van die wieren los
& maak een
zeezoek fort
dat ruisend staat
met niemands
heup te wiegen.

(06/02/2000 2:31 ... 10-11-18/06/2005 09 :04)