Cyberspaces:

The term coined by Wiliam Gibson Neuromancer (1960’s)

Neuromancer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

On the ‘the non-space of the mind’.

Cybernetic:ability to transfer from a to b, without loss (time, quality, etc.)

Consensual hallucinations

Hallucination: Most personal thing you can have, cannot be verified by anybody (it is in the mind..); the opposite of the real. (fe. ideologies that are in ones head and are not shared)

Consensual: How do we know that the blue as I see it is the same as how anyone else sees it? This is consensus. So cyberspace, a consensual hallucination.

Gibson: A binary that is constantly operating when you are operating in the virtual space

How to collapse this binary?

Talking about registers of different kinds of reality. VR is just one of them.

How do we understand the body and all other things/objects that surround us? This understanding is all based on consensual hallucinations. It is data that ranges in the non-space of the mind.

For example:

There is light and shadow and the area where they meet; the penumbra. The in-between of light and shadow; an interplay of light and shadow, this is the penumbra. It is here where ‘strange’ things happen.

Looking at a solar eclipse, at the perfect time, you can’t see the sun, only the shadow. But still you will see a fine line of light around the shadow…

The term penumbra explained by a text from Nishant at n.e.w.s.: http://northeastwestsouth.net/brief-treatise-despair-meaning-or-pointlessness-everything-0

A negative space, a nice example:

Rana Dasgupta – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia :

(novel ‘Solo’) writes in style and overproduction of non-meaning (non-space of meaning).

review:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/28/solo-rana-dasgupta-book-review

Space is defined as an emptiness of a kind, image a world there is no vacuum, no emptiness.

Space will constantly need other objects to define it self, otherwise there would not be anything to define space by.

 

Question: How do you build a net?

Answer: You take a lot of holes and put them to gather.

 

“Dr. Crusher: Computer, what is the nature of the universe?

Computer: The universe is a spheroid region, 705 meters in diameter.

 

Quantum:

The ability to think that or believe there exists a universe that every single thing that can happen that will happen.

The quantum takes away the space from the equation, from the ‘universe’.

If everything can happen, also nothing can happen. So there won’t be space.

For instance a writer from Singapore: Chua Beng Huat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chua_Beng_Huat

In Singapore there is no space for citizenship, only the state. You want to buy chewing gum, but no you cannot chew.

You have to negotiate with yourself, while it is a police state and nobody else will argue with you.

An interesting question: “What happens to the table when I am not looking at it??”  (novel by Virginia Wolff)

 

On relation of time to space.

Andy Clarke  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Clark : ‘the natural born cyborgs’ (time is a human born construction). We are creatures of the present and have constructs over history which pushes us into the future.

Why are we looking forward into the unknown, instead of looking into what we know (in the past)

(‘the Troll’ by Andy Clark).

The Troll: http://openpolitics.ca/Troll+Age

In cyberspace the decay of time is different than in the real. The non-space encompasses non-time.

Also in this context it might be good to check the Frankfurt School:

Frankfurt School – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A member of the Frankfurt School; Siegfried Kracauer wrote interesting pieces about the non-space.

Siegfried Kracauer – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction. – Princeton University Press

Physical non-space; something that belongs to 2 nation states. It is the in between between different places.

Examples; airports, or hotel lobbies (before you checked in).

The feature film the Terminal shows a funny/interesting example of this.

The Terminal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Just a remark in between; digital technology is not only about tools; so don’t just take it for granted. They are also conceptual tools.

 

3 models of defining space: (or rather non-space)

1) The location based model

Space is understood of a location from which stories can be told. An anchor for relationships between pause and effect (narration, or narrative space) in a construct of time.

In the early 90’s; a group of people created a MUD, Multiple User Dungeon (text based adventures, one of the first) ’Lamba Moo’ (greek letters). In this game of Lambda Moo, in room 17 something strange happened. There was the action of the first cyber rape in history.

Julian Dibbell » A Rape in Cyberspace

http://www.media-ecology.org/publications/MEA_proceedings/v1/virtual_misbehavior.html

2) For archeologists’, space would be based on what one would find in that space. If nothing is found in that space it wouldn’t be a space, but that is just too easy. The second model would be geological model of space. Every piece of earth is valid. Geologists place themselves in that construct of space (everyday practices).

Question: Why don’t we make archives of unimportant things? We only make archives of ‘important things’

3) And the last being the model of affect space. Affect cannot be quantified (like love for instance), things/objects that cannot be materialistically represented. So relationships will fit this.

For technology, we relate to this in access (the economical access), these people are ‘outside’ the online space. (12.5% of 1.2 billion in India).

We, people, are starting to develop affectuous relations with technology;

Example of a city in India that was moved to ‘make’ internet available. Nishant will make his text available (will be linked here).

An other example would be Michael Goldman on Bangalore:http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/articles/view/304-world-city-talk .

15:57 IST;

Now we just went through some warp holes and could barely manoeuver our way out of a black hole, in the end all our brains are starting to be mixed up.

So a 10 minutes break… before we continue with Hans, but first….

a space anomaly encountered in Bangalore..

 

And even during the break the discussion with Nishant continued:

• 16:12 Hans’ presentation

Hans Varghese Mathews read philosophy as an undergraduate, at the University of Southern California, studying logic and aesthetics; and went on to obtain a doctorate in mathematics, from the University of Wisconsin, studying algebraic topology primarily, with mathematical logic and philosophy as subsidiary subjects. He has an abiding interest in the formal understanding of painting and poetry; and a more recent and dominating interest in the mathematisation of the social sciences.

In regard to the metaproject of ‘Space the Final Frontier’ whereby we are indexing the ‘shadow worlds of Bangalore’, Hans was asked to help us think through how we can build a database of our projects, in relation to already existing examples along with how we would define those parameters:

Starting with the use of FLICKR, a query on non-space

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=you%27ll+meet+a+dark+stranger&m=text

You have to enter text when you upload pictures to Flickr (there are a lots of words other people already entered).

Information has to be added for other people to be able to search the database.

A search will be done on the base of similarities. In the query you’ll enter words, the search will be looking at similarities in the database and the query. The more similarities, the better the match;

A measure of similarities would be the cosine similarity or cosine measure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine_similarity )

‘Latent semantic indexing’ (Latent semantic indexing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia )

Singular value decomposition (SVD) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_value_decomposition

Structures and/or dimensions of preferences (by describing a space to a reference point), the space of preferences.

(If people like to go into the subject deeper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvalue )

M=U{SUM}V*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rank_of_a_matrix

“We are all getting more and more confused and away from home in this world of mathematics which Hans is trying to broadcast to all of the crew members of the Enterprise…”

So for just getting our feet back to the ground; the concept of the matrix would be a basic ‘xls-sheet’.

The matrices don’t have to be static in time and the question for the SVD would be how many times the matrix would be updated.

Hans is getting everyone confused:

Hans adds extraneously: An interesting read could be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Danto

on the Animals as Art Historicans .

Back to matrices and searching.

For computers it is quite easy to process words, but it is much harder to compare if pictures are alike.

After a query on words and adding the feedback of the most searched object clicked on by users the list is rearranged accordingly to popular clicks.

And this brings us to ‘page ranking’

PageRank – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A notion of relevance:

The meaning of algorithm traversal might get clearer by looking at ‘tree traversal’ at wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_traversal

To talk about indexing; KISS, keep it simple stupid..

Some theory in practice:

Photosynth website:http://photosynth.net/

Photosynth launch presentation:

http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html

 

And of course in the end Hans leaves us in complete confusion about matrices and cross searches and algorithms at exactly 17:00 IST.

The really friendly Peter Brothers say goodbye and thank all the participants for being so an perceptive audience. They have been a great help for most of our projects. Many thanks for that from all of us!!

The crew spreads out and the Enterprise crew members find out that the Enterprise already has taken off. They had to find an alternate way to get home. Captain Kirk escaped in a small in a small shuttle on a separate mission.

 

“It was…fun…

-James Kirk, on life, Star Trek: Generations”

 

Eelco,

out.