cluster - mediated space etc. » phenomenology

(pre)occupations

Darrell Berry — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 18:53:32 +0000

Tools sink into extended being: it takes craft and intent to keep them visible. I’m wondering if there’s some connection with Shklovsky’s thoughts on art: that art exists to make perception difficult. Is art, amongst the other things it is, what makes us aware of what is the kernel of us, minus our embedded tools, yet through their use in its creation? Is that some of what art does, and how?

Ink that in five lines
becomes a bunch of nettles,
in the night points one step north; where the colour of water
gets over the road,
over the pearl of the three-quarter moon, gets in
after, before
the first thought

The paleolithic cave painters, on their backs in the long dark, representing.

From Here to Where?

Darrell Berry — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 11:25:47 +0000

{Performance -> canned performance -> mass reproduction -> -> nude media -> -> -> what?}

Fetishism of the playlist (post-DJ culture, is everyone with a jog dial a performer)?

Fetishism of scarcity? What is scarce? Provenance {DRM -> digitally signed limited edition, patina of handlings transcribed via PKE}?

Are Metaphors Arbitrary?

Darrell Berry — Fri, 19 Sep 2003 21:19:34 +0000

We suggest that the nonarbitrariness both of synaesthesia and of metaphor (and their directionality) arise because of constraints imposed by evolution and by neural hardware (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001a). For example, you say loud shirt but you rarely say red sound; you say sharp taste but rarely bitter touch.
S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard, The Phenomenology of Synaesthesia, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 10, No. 8, 2003

Place, Location, and Geolocated MOOs

Darrell Berry — Tue, 25 Feb 2003 11:00:45 +0000

There is a fundamental difference between the notions of place and of location. A location is completely specified by its cartography; a place owes its phenomenology to its unique context of neighbourhood and individual experience, in time. Place is what becomes of locations when things happen there.

I admit this distinction escaped me when I was first writing about augmented realities, but it has been brought home to me by projects Ben mentioned today. mudengland and mudlondon are MOOs linked to geographic metadata — very similar in concept to my original Ku24 project in Tokyo, albeit utilising much more modern technologies.

The MOOs work, but they also highlight the differences between place and location. In mudlondon, locations feel strongly quantised – to get from Oxford Circus to Hoxton you ‘go east’, but there is a lot of conceptual work to be done before that ‘going eastness’ feels different to the ‘going eastness’ which gets you from there to say Bethnal Green. By which I mean something more than it simply being, say, one move east to HMV, two to Tottenham Court Road, forty-three to Liverpool Street. The MOO is a series of linked places, but in the physical world the map is not so conveniently the territory. Place is fuzzier — real-worldlier — than a digraph of interlinked GPS coordinates. Experientially, places are contextualised by their neighbourhoods, themselves nests of neighbourhoods. Likewise, distance, intentionality and velocity alter the scale of our attention. The technical challenge is to map this experiential lustre into metadata and interfaces to humanise an otherwise arid landscape of maps.

Reception & Range

Darrell Berry — Wed, 12 Feb 2003 12:48:33 +0000

The slideshow accompanying Tetsuo’s presentation at the Tate was titled The Phenomenology Of Radio. He didn’t really develop that theme in his talk, but his website goes a little further, and touches on the phenomenology of reception, as experienced through very low power community FM. Reception, he points out, is active. To get a signal, you may have to go outdoors, or at least place your receiver somewhere unusual. You are not a passive consumer, you are involved in the process. This thought extends to wireless: you must actively seek out an open node, and locate yourself in relation to both it and your particular needs, in the moment. This reflects, of course, the currently few locations where reception is even possible, let alone appropriate to a given need. Community networking can exploit this phenomenology. The most simple location-sensitivity is defined through range: certain content can be kept local — accessible only if you are in range of the wifi segment on which it is hosted. Keeping content local to subnets may be the easiest way for communities to create location-specific experiences — exploiting the raw characteristics of radio reception to force the active presence of an audience.