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“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.”

Kurt Vonnegut

The narrative within the narrative: all discourse lives within the context of another discourse.

Narrative is the protoypical logos relationship between two ideas, two moments, two spaces, a time and a space, a moment that exists forever on its own at its singular core and is simultaneously contextualized in an infinite number of stories (1.) Narrative precedes all discourse.

Narrative = noumenon

Time-line (discourse) = phenomenon

1. The quote by Vonnegut was famously re-contextualized by Philip Jose Farmer writing as Kilgore Trout, author of “Venus on the Half-Shell.” Trout was originally one of by Kurt Vonnegut’s characters. )

if we stop thinking of narrative as a singular experience –
do we read the same sentence in different ways?
do we approach the same words with the completely different context we bring to it from the concurrent perspective of our space and time?

if so, what are space and time?

http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/timespace.htm

Space/Time
“The first definition of “time” in the Oxford English Dictionary is “a space or extent of time” (OED).  The first definition of “space” is “denoting time or duration” (OED).  These circular definitions demonstrate the congruity between time and space as concepts.”

Scope and Scale

Scope = Depth (Time)
Scale = Form, the ground covered

These dimensions are the upper liminal limit of our ontological perception. They are perceived as somehow different from each other, which characterizes our existence.

Mathematically, we are aware of many more dimensions. Statistics science, for example, deals with multiple-dimension spaces all the time (no pun). However, we tend to conceive of these as ‘data spaces’ and do not experience them in the same way as the time and space we ‘live’ in. Visualizations of these dimensions are inevitably experienced in the remediated lower dimension of space-time.

a two dimensional imagining of a Tralfamadorian, found here the COLORS
The Tralfamadorians, in Kurt Vonneguts non-linear <novel/ Slaughterhouse-Five />, are time detached alien entities who see time as we see form. They experience all time ‘simultaneously’, and are predeterministic (as a result?) in attitude – they can choose can focus on a moment, but can’t change anything.

This view of ourselves is visualized here,
http://thehomegalaxy.com/Metanoiaa/metanoiaa.html

for further info, check out Bonnie DeVarco

http://scaleindependentthought.typepad.com/scale_independent_thought/deep-time/

Can the scope of time be anything other than our own existence?

http://visav.phys.uvic.ca/~babul/AstroCourses/P303/BB-slide.htm
Astrophysical age of universe currently believed to be 13.7 billion years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpa_(aeon)
(Sanskrit view of time is immense, but calculated; cycles within cycles, see “Kalpa and other periods of time” where one cycle is defined as almost 40 billion years )

http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/vy2k/new-seclusion.cfm
“With the dissolution of the scale of our human environment (prefigured by the telescope and radicalized by the satellite), the very reality of the world is reduced to nil (or next to nothing), leading inevitably to a ‘catastrophic sense of incarceration now that humanity is literally deprived of horizon’ (Virilio, “Open Sky” p. 41)

time in games

Time and Computer Games
Or “No, that’s not what happened”
Michael Hitchens
Department of Computing
Macquarie University
NSW 2109 Australia
• Playing time: the objective real world chronological time experienced by a player during and between game play sessions.
• Engine time: The objective chronological real world time in which a game engine executes.
• Game Progress time: A abstract measure of time tracking movement towards game completion and allowing events to be related in terms of happens-before and happens-after
• Game World time: chronological time within the game world

Juul, J., “Introduction to Game Time”. In First Person: New
Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Wardrip-
Fruin, N. & Harrigan, P., Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press, 2004, 131-142.

Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media
Ryan, Marie-Laure
Pages: 417
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Date Published: 02/2001

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afternoon,_a_story
“Afternoon” the first Hypertext story

http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/
The Electronic Labyrinth
a study of the implications of hypertext for creative writers looking to move beyond traditional notions of linearity, by Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, and Robin Parmar

“Two of the most obvious yet significant features of online communication are speed and reach (Figure 2.1). The combination of these two factors makes Internet communication extremely powerful. Take speed. With the split second it takes to press a single key, text, sounds, or visual information can be sent across the globe. The Internet inspires speediness. (…) speed is certainly changing how we live and what we expect, and it may be changing our mental states as well.”

Gurak, Laura J.. Cyberliteracy : Navigating the Internet with Awareness.
New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press, 2001. p 30.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/sfu/Doc?id=10169967&ppg=41
Copyright © 2001. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

scope and scale of time
http://visav.phys.uvic.ca/~babul/AstroCourses/P303/BB-slide.htm
http://www.santhigiri.com/cosmic/explanation.htm (Sanskrit view of time)
http://scaleindependentthought.typepad.com/scale_independent_thought/deep-time/

“With the dissolution of the scale of our human environment (prefigured by the telescope and radicalized by the satellite), the very reality of the world is reduced to nil (or next to nothing), leading inevitably to a ‘catastrophic sense of incarceration now that humanity is literally deprived of horizon” (Virilio, “Open Sky” p. 41). sourced from http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/vy2k/new-seclusion.cfm

Perception of Time

“Time is a condition for the existence of our ‘I’. It is like a kind of culture medium that is destroyed when it is no longer needed, once the links are severed between the individual personality and the conditions of existence. And the moment death is also the death of individual time: The life of a human being becomes inaccessible to the feeling of those remaining alive, dead for those around him.” (Tarkovsky, p. 57)
Tarkovsky, Andrey. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema
Translated from the Russian by Kitty Hunter-Blair
Austin: University of Texas Press (1986)

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/
the specious present
(specious = superficially plausible but conceptually misleading/problematic)

“The relation of experience to time has not been profoundly studied. Its objects are given as being of the present, but the part of time referred to by the datum is a very different thing from the
conterminous of the past and future which philosophy denotes by the name Present. The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past – a recent past – delusively given as being a time that intervenes between the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and let the past, that is given as being the past, be known as the obvious past. All the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener to be contained in the present. All the changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder to be contained in the present. At the instant of the termination of such series, no part of the time measured by them seems to be a past. Time, then, considered relatively to human apprehension, consists of four parts, viz., the obvious past, the specious present, the real present, and the future. Omitting the specious present, it consists of three … nonentities – the past, which does not exist, the future, which does not exist, and their conterminous, the present; the faculty from which it proceeds lies to us in the fiction of the specious present.”
(James, Principles, 609; quoted from Kelly, The Alternative, 167-8)

Holly K. Andersen, Rick Grush. A Brief History of Time-Consciousness: Historical Precursors to James and Husserl. Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 47, Number 2, April 2009, pp. 277-307

the dilemma of the perception of time:
(1) What we perceive, we perceive as present.
(2) We perceive motion.
(3) Motion occurs over an interval.
Therefore: What we perceive as present occurs over an interval.

“Still, there is more than an air of paradox about this. If successive parts of the motion (or musical phrase, or whatever change we perceive) are perceived as present, then surely they are perceived as simultaneous. But if they are perceived as simultaneous, then the motion will simply be a blur, as it is in cases where it is too fast to perceive as motion. The fact that we do not see it as motion suggests that we do not see the successive parts of it as simultaneous, and so do not see them as present.”
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/#4

Micro vs. Macro

Phenomenology

Kant’s Views on Space and Time
heavy and critical thinking…
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-spacetime/

Perception of space

“the ground covered”
Movement
“Space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering. The space covered is divisible, indeed infinitely divisible, whilst movement is indivisible, or cannot be divided without changing qualitatively each time it is divided. This already presupposes a more complex idea: the spaces covered all belong to a single, identical, homogeneous space, while the movements are heterogeneous, irreducible among themselves.” (Deleuze, p.1)
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Hertzian space

from place to <non-place>
“Speed destroys real space in favour of real time” (Virilio)
Kazys Varnelis: http://www.arch.columbia.edu/users/kv2157columbiaedu :
“…beyond corporeal space, we increasingly also live in Hertzian space, a cloud of electromagnetic radiation that bathes us in information.” http://varnelis.net/articles/architecture_for_hertzian_space

Paul Virilio http://www.egs.edu/faculty/paul-virilio/biography/ :
http://www.ctheory.http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=72
“Cyberspace is a new form of perspective. It does not coincide with the audio-visual perspective which we already know. It is a fully new perspective, free of any previous reference: it is a tactile perspective. To see at a distance, to hear at a distance: that was the essence of the audio-visual perspective of old. But to reach at a distance, to feel at a distance, that amounts to shifting the perspective towards a domain it did not yet encompass: that of contact, of contact-at-a-distance: tele-contact.”
Lev Manovich: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/lev-manovich/biography/ :
“What is human nature and what is technology? How does one draw the boundary between the two in the twentieth century? Both Benjamin and Virilio solve this problem in the same way. They equate nature with spatial distance between the observer and the observed; and  they see technologies as destroying this distance.”
http://www.manovich.net/TEXT/Benjamin-Virilio.html

ME++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City
William J. Mitchell

“Throughout history, humans have created unique physical spaces in which to live, work and socialize. But the digital age has completely transformed the places in which we conduct our affairs, according to William J. Mitchell. We don’t congregate at the town bank any more for financial transactions. We visit ATMs or bank online. Interactions that once required people to face each other now take place via computer, often across vast distances. Mitchell describes the disappearance of familiar public structures like phone booths, as well as the migration of work from office to just about anywhere a wireless connection is possible. As technology becomes imbedded in our lives and literally disappears into the woodwork, Mitchell sees the possibility for new kinds of extended communities. Network technology has enabled “discontinuous, asynchronous global agoras,” says Mitchell, exemplified by the most recent Gulf War protests. Organizers used digital space (email lists and websites) to help orchestrate public gatherings, which in turn generated images fed back to the Internet, spurring interest in country after country, time-zone after time-zone. Mitchell believes that such networks open up new methods for human assembly and political organization, but also increase the risks to individuals of surveillance.”

Mitchell video,  November 13, 2003, Running Time: 1:09:43

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/170

other important related work:
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities
New York: Vintage Books, Random House (1992)

Translation and its issues

Spectacular time
“The Time of Production, time-as-commodity, is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals. It is irreversible time made abstract: each segment must demonstrate by the clock its purely quantitative equality with all other segments. This time manifests nothing in its effective reality aside from its exchangeability. It is under the rule of time-as-commodity that “time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most time’s carcass” (The Poverty of Philosophy). This is time devalued – the complete inversion of time as “the sphere of human development”. (Debord, 147)
“The self-approbation of the time of modern survival can only be reinforced, in the spectacle, by reduction in its use value. The reality of time has been replaced by its publicity.” (Debord, 154)
“As Hegel showed, time is a necessary alienation, being the medium in which the subject realizes himself while losing himself, becomes other in order to become truly himself. The opposite obtains in the case of the alienation that now holds sway – the alienation suffered by the producers of an estranged present. This is a spatial alienation, whereby a society which radically servers the subject from the activity that it steals from him separates him in the first place from his own time. Social alienation, though in principle surmountable, is nevertheless the alienation that has forbidden and petrified the possibilities and risks of a living alienation within time.” (Debord, 161)
“The world already has the dream of such a time; it has yet to come into possession of the consciousness that will allow it to experience its reality.” (Debord, 164)
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle.  New York: Zone Books (1995)

Sensory space

Visual/ Sensorial Space
Differences in the senses: structural? neurological? … conceptual?
visual studies:
The visual field of the human eye spans approximately 120 degrees of arc. However, most of that arc is peripheral vision [Wikipedia]. We perceive objects within our vision span. Our vision gets distorted as the span reduces while getting close to an object.

As we extend our vision experience to 360 degrees (through use of immersive imaging technologies or as yet undiscovered new modalities), how does what we term consciousness adapt to these changes?

“Looking at vision”:

Panoptic
All-seen
Greek panoptos, fully visible : pan-, with respect to everything, fully; see pan- + optos, visible
( http://www.thefreedictionary.com/panoptic)

Panopticism

The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785.
Michel Foucault observed that the Panopticon was a metaphorical model of the tendency of hierarchical structures to ‘observe and normalize’

Holoptic

All-seeing

“whole-eyed” http://bugguide.net/node/view/155600

The Holoptic eye of the fly.

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

The fly’s proprioceptive space adjusts to the orientation of its eyes.

“The heads of flies were passively turned during fixed flight (open loop conditions). The turning stimuli had ramp-shaped onsets. The resulting torque produced by the thorax was plotted as a function of the degree of head-turn.
“Directional, passive turns of the head evoke active turning tendencies (yawing forces) of the same sign from the thorax. The strength of these tendencies is dependent on the size of the given angle through which the head was turned. The cushion of sensory hairs on the neck (prosternal organ) is very important in the elicitation of the turning tendencies. The results which have been obtained indicate that the position of the fly’s head has a substantial influence on the magnitude of the turning tendencies elicited by visual stimuli.”
Eckehard Liske, The influence of head position on the flight behaviour of the fly. Calliphora erythrocephala, Journal of Insect Physiology, Volume 23, Issue 3, 1977, Pages 375-379, ISSN 0022-1910, DOI: 10.1016/0022-1910(77)90276-(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6T3F-49N8SHS-C/2/92b8419958fff141bc1785b588474fcb)

Within this floating immersive vision bubble, a percept (the Other) we know nothing about.

“We characterize the computation of motion in the fly visual system as a mapping from the high dimensional space of signals in the retinal photodetector array to the probability of generating an action potential in a motion sensitive neuron. Our approach to this problem identifies a low dimensional subspace of signals within which the neuron is most sensitive, and then samples this subspace to visualize the nonlinear structure of the mapping. The results illustrate the computational strategies predicted for a system that makes optimal motion estimates given the physical noise sources in the detector array. More generally, the hypothesis that neurons are sensitive to low dimensional subspaces of their inputs formalizes the intuitive notion of feature selectivity and suggests a strategy for characterizing the neural processing of complex, naturalistic sensory inputs.”
Features and dimensions: Motion estimation in fly vision.
Bialek, William., and de Ruyter van Steveninck Rob R. http://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio/0505003v1

The success of this form of navigation is likely to be adopted by robotics…and may already be progressively incorporated in our phenomenological model through mediated connections to Hertzian Space.

Holopticism
http://wiki.thetransitioner.org/English/Holopticism
“Holopticism is a combination of Greek words holos (whole, holistic, holography…), optiké (vision) and tekhné (art, technique). It expresses the capacity for players in a given organization (or group) to perceive the emerging whole of the organization as if it were a unique entity…”

a visualization that suggests liminal polarity …

How would our consciousness perceive this ubiquitous immmersivity?

Scopic
Merleau-Ponty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty
“all consciousness is perceptual consciousness”.

“I can’t see you, can you see me?”
Children’s hide and seek game strategy

As W.J.T. Mitchell points out in What Pictures Want, this system “provides an especially powerful tool for understanding why it is that images, works of art, media, figures and metaphors have ‘lives of their own’”. [8] The scopic relation means that every mediated image, through the eye and beyond, adds another layer of the gaze and the stain. By consciously using this relation to their advantage artists are able to engage the viewer on levels that are unconscious, but innate.
http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/scopicvocative.htm

“His (…) elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts his at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god.
The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.”
Michel de Certeau (“Walking in the City”)

The Nature of Consciousness
“Time is said to be irreversible. And this is true enough in the sense that ‘you can’t bring back the past’, as they say. But what exactly is this ‘past’? Is it what has passed? And what does ‘passed’ mean for a person when for each of us the past is the bearer of all that is constant in the reality of the present, of each current moment? In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight only in its recollection.” (Tarkovsky, p. 58)
“Time, imprinted in the frame, dictates the particular editing principle; and the pieces that ‘won’t edit’ – that can’t be properly joined – are those which record a radically different kind of time. One cannot, for instance, put actual time together with conceptual time, any more than one can join water pipes of different diameter.” (Tarkovsky, p. 117)

Parallel vs. sequential consciousness
fragmentation of consciousness (multitasking)…

the non-sequiter – as soon as a narrative forms, a bridge has been made … system sequence vs. narrative continuity …

Reaction …future work

intervention – hacking public space

we may understand this as the active remediation of perceived space and time,  the intentional entering into one context of another, psychohyperdermic transgression of the liminal barrier

http://www.neural.it/art/2011/01/crashvertise_lets_make_crashes.phtml
“As soon as a serious crash takes place amid the bustle of the city, a Crashvertise team will head to the site to place signs and branded warning triangles for the bystanders to inspect. They also take pictures of the tragedy scene for publishing on the social networks and for creating a viral marketing campaign as soon as possible.”

more
http://vooruit-exe.be/2010/01/22/electrified-hacking-public-space
http://smak.be/tentoonstelling.php?la=en&y=&tid=&t=&id=484
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cmpui9yhYSQ
ELECTRIFIED 02 – Hacking Public Space // Opening night fri 02.04.10 @ S.M.A.K.

http://www.gamestudies.org/0501/lindley/
The Semiotics of Time Structure in Ludic Space As a Foundation for Analysis and Design
by Craig A. Lindley

“For any particular ludic system, such as a computer game, time structure can be considered in terms of a number of distinct layers of meaning analogous to the levels of encoding identified in structuralist narrative theory: a generation level, a simulation level, a performance level and a discourse level.”

as we become nomadic again

http://www.microcompacthome.com/index.php
“The team of researchers and designers based in London and at the Technical University in Munich developed the m-ch as an answer to an increasing demand for short stay living for students, business people, sports and leisure use and for weekenders.”

architecture
the sands of time

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/architecture/

http://unlimitedurbanwoods.com/nieuws.php?taal=&nieuwsid=91

Gecekondu DUS Summerhouse Hotel
In an era where over half of the residents of many large cities live in informal settlements, and over a billion squatters inhabit the world, with this number growing rapidly, one can question if the formal is normal.

Gecekundu, the Turkish name for shanty building, literally means ‘built over night’. Because these buildings are built in one night, the founder of the building receives ownership rights.

The Hotel will live up to its temporary character: Its building stones are the archetypical nomadic bags, the so-called china bags (or‘turkentassen’), filled with sand from the beach. Would this make the house legal as it is only re-shaping the sand that is already there?

http://www.dillerscofidio.com/blur.html
Blur Building

Blur is an anti-spectacle. Contrary to immersive environments that strive for high-definition visual fidelity with ever-greater technical virtuosity, Blur is decidedly low-definition: there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself.