[Nettime-bold] A very old post by Max Herman all about SPACE

[Nmherman@aol.com]

Subj:   Fwd: Identification, Mapping, Starrynight, and Genius 2000
Date:   6/4/99 1:30:36 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From:   <A HREF="mailto:Nmherman">Nmherman</A>
To: <A HREF="mailto:GENIUS-2000@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM">
GENIUS-2000@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM</A>

 
-----------------
Forwarded Message: 
Subj:   Fwd: Identification, Mapping, Starrynight, and Genius 2000
Date:   6/4/99 1:08:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time
From:   <A HREF="mailto:Nmherman">Nmherman</A>
To: <A HREF="mailto:list@rhizome.org">list@rhizome.org</A>



Daily Post for June 3, 1999


(The enclosed forwarded message is from an online discussion on Shock of the 
View, December 1998.  It is relevant both as a single internet text, as well 
as a map for reading other internet texts and objects that deal with mapping, 
identity, community, and other current discussions of internet topology.)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Information generated digitally and distributed via highly complex networks 
is defined mainly by two kinds of processes:  identification and maps.  Most 
of the time, identification is a process directed by the user, whereas 
mapping is directed by the producer or provider.  

Identification involves one or more of several actions initiated and carried 
out by the user.   The first and only necessary requirement is to obtain 
access to a PC and the web.  Other identification-style actions are: to 
register one's e-mail address with a site to permit filtering if necessary; 
to select an address or starting point, generally a website or ftp file; and 
to pay attention to the data built by the provider.  These might be called 
first-order identifications.  

Second-order identifications might involve a subscription or other decision 
to be involved with a collective use of the provided material, and for your 
participation to be listed on your posts (i.e., Rhizome_Raw: Identification, 
Mapping, Starrynight, and Genius 2000).  There are also psychological issues, 
like trusting or admiring the providers and believing that their efforts, 
while commanding more and better technology than your efforts, are 
essentially in your best interest.  For example, one might say "I really like 
the whole Rhizome project.  They are increasing public interest and awareness 
of new media art, and that's one of my goals as well.  They are doing good 
work; I support them; they make good use of their technology."

Trying to define third-level identification, and get on with the essay, 
illustrates how mapping and identification are really not discrete 
categories.  With third level ID, the provider is becoming more involved.  
The identification is not chosen by the user, but assigned to the user by the 
provider based on the user's activity or history.  This is not simply 
recording the user's address or username.  It means that the provider is 
classifying the user in some way, and shaping the provided content 
accordingly.  For example, if a user attends a lot of pornography sites, 
registering with an e-mail address, a provider might decide to add the user's 
name to mailing lists recommending hot new porn sites.  Because the user's 
information is legally confidential, advanced third-order identifications are 
rather limited, but they may become far more prevalent in the future.  
Certainly the technology is there.

At the point where the provider begins to make most of the decisions, mapping 
is a better word to describe how the information is organized.  Because the 
user no longer has the technology or the desire to shape the content any 
further, the provider takes over, ordering the terrain according to whatever 
concepts they find appropriate.  News sites select the news and do layout, 
create links, and obtain advertising.  Museum sites decide what to display, 
and how the user will proceed through the information.  Net.art sites decide 
what images and audio will be available, and how the user's path will thread 
or theme (two concepts used in shopping mall design).

The initial creation of the site content and dynamics is first-order mapping, 
the most basic level of the provider's activity.  Second-order mapping 
consists of content-modification based on user's actual use of the site.  
This information does belong to the provider and can be used to instantly 
modify the content provided.  For example, a commercial site can record which 
ads get the most hits, and alter their ad strategy accordingly.  A news site 
can monitor which stories get the most hits, and decided to run similar 
stories.  A net.art site might involve some kind of algorithm by which 
certain decisions by the user result in particular versions of the 
information being either presented or withheld.  

Third-order mapping occurs mostly in the provider's head; and here the 
distinction between identification and mapping blurs again.  The provider 
looks at the whole situation in toto, and may make alterations in the content 
based on their own recognitions and reflections.  The general response to the 
site, and more intangible factors such as external developments and the 
cultural climate, become the focus of the provider's process.  The provider 
creates a mental picture of the site and its context, and may reorient the 
content radically depending on whatever realizations or insights occur.  Here 
the actual physical data input by users is out of the mapping process, which 
occurs in the brain of the provider.

At this point, mapping begins to revert to identification.  The provider 
takes on an internal decision-making or image-making role.  The content is 
only relevant in terms of the creative process, the process of envisioning 
the medium and its use.  The material technological disparity between the 
provider and the user, which forms the primary basis for the distinction, is 
not active during third-order mapping, because this is an internal cognitive 
process.  Clearly, technical knowledge, the awareness of future access, and 
cultural knowlege play a huge role in this phase of production, and for the 
most part inertially maintain both the thinking-patterns and future actions 
of the person in question.  Providers tend to third-order map like providers, 
and remain providers in their future actions, while users third-order map 
like users and remain users in their future actions.  This inertia is 
intellectual, at this stage, and not physically technological.

This inertia or pattern-consistency during third-order mapping shares many 
similarities with identification.  Knowledge, role, and access are defined 
internally, and the provider may choose to close down the site and go back to 
surfing.  A user may decide to become a provider, set up a site, or buy a 
server.  Also, a provider may decide to think like a user in order to predict 
the most effective content.  This is a sort of spiritual or psychological 
process of communal awareness in which the roles of user and provider may 
blur into a hybrid of identification and mapping in complex permutations.

++++++++++++++++++++

This description of the basic modes of contemporary digital information makes 
a lot more sense if we look at particular examples.  Because the categories 
of identification and mapping are only distinct in practice (in the 
distribution of technology) and because of a certain cultural climate 
(knowlege and beliefs), it can become difficult to understand the actual 
significance of this historical formation.  Many people believe this 
distinction is irrelevant or trivial, simply a fact of life in which some 
people are artists and others are audience, some govern and some are 
governed, some rich and some poor, some enlightened and some unenlightened.

If we consider a net.art production like Rhizome's Starrynight, however, it 
becomes impossible to overlook the user/provider dynamic at work.  The 
providers--in this case the Rhizome site-builders--have chosen a particular 
way to offer access to a content-base of articles.  The content is displayed 
using a visual depiction of stars, an interface which brightens particular 
stars if they are clicked, and a way of indexing the content according to 
categories like video, feminism, CD-Rom, access, utopia, funding, etc.  Some 
of the articles, it seems, have been purposely selected.  (I get this 
impression from seeing an article from 1996; perhaps every article ever 
printed in Rhizome is shown as a single lit pixel.)  

Taken as an autonomous work of art, Starrynight is based on certain roles 
being played by the site-builders and the users or contributors of text, as 
well as users of the interface itself.  From a personal aesthetic standpoint, 
I find the presentation of content too library-ish--a very confusing and 
unnavigable library--lacking the freshness of the immediate work being done 
on the Raw newsgroup.  I also find the pseudo-interactivity of different 
stars getting brighter with each reading a very patronizing and frankly 
obnoxious concept of the role of the user.  It's like the song, "Everybody is 
a Star."  Like a lot of Rhizome, I think Starrynight works best as a hideous 
monstrosity ironically masquerading as utopia.  Carnival ugliness without the 
roar of the crowd to render it comical.

Of course, my opinion of the applet is based on my own concerns about net.art 
and information culture in general.  Many users may find Starrynight 
illuminating and pleasing to the eye, a harmlessly metaphorical interface 
with new media art criticism.  In my work, I am primarily concerned with 
subjecting the net.art world to uncompromising scrutiny, to prevent the 
untimely ascendancy of destructive traditional concepts within the media of 
the web.  

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In closing, I would like to mention a few details about my own work as part 
of the Genius 2000 Project, as a point of contrast to Starrynight.

1.  Starrynight uses the image of the illuminated point of light as a visual 
metaphor of the creative engagement between user and provider.  The metaphor 
is technologically correct but conceptually absurd.  The concepts of user and 
provider, identification and mapping, are horrifically oversimplified in a 
piece of kitsch that rivals Disneyland in its cheesy self-promotion.  The 
Genius 2000 Project, on the other hand, uses the rigorous concept of 
collision and intersection to express a complex and postmodern understanding 
of history (content) and cognition (use).  

2.  The Genius 2000 Project both conceptualizes and enacts the transient 
dynamic of user and provider, identification and mapping.  By identifying 
one's self and one's work as part of the Project, the entirety of which is 
mapped according to a single fractal algorithm, awareness of the 
connectedness of use and production is constantly rejuvenated in flux.  Both 
cognitive and technological actions are identification and mapping 
simultaneously. The technology-driven categories are thrown into the 
proverbial garbage can.

3.  Starrynight uses a cosmological metaphor of a point of light, varying in 
luminosity, to describe the interaction of use and content.  The Genius 2000 
Project uses the much more effective concept of the dark pixel to negate the 
false equation of technology with cognition.  The dark pixel preserves Marx's 
distinction between work and capital, while the point of light image only 
reinforces (by omission) traditional models of production.

+++++++++++++++++

Max Herman
The Genius 2000 Project
Video Available Now
www.geocities.com/~genius-2000


-----------------
Forwarded Message: 
Subj:   You should buy an early number First Edition for Anthology, $19.99, 
John
Date:   6/1/99 9:51:19 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From:   <A HREF="mailto:Nmherman">Nmherman</A>
To: <A HREF="mailto:cinemania@erols.com">cinemania@erols.com</A>

Subj:   A Genius 2000 World and how it Works
Date:   12/12/98
To: <A HREF="mailto:simon@babar.demon.co.uk">simon@babar.demon.co.uk</A>
To: <A HREF="mailto:shock@rhizome.walkerart.org">shock@rhizome.walkerart.org
</A>

In a message dated 12/11/98 2:45:02 AM Pacific Standard Time, 
simon@babar.demon.co.uk writes:

>  You know how official language works. How
>  would it work in a Genius 2000 world? Perhaps for Max Herman?

Official Genius 2000 language for "people" is people, meaning variously: 
human beings per se; all the people right now; all the people ever; some 
specific set of people now, past, or predicted.

Also, "people" means shiny happy genius-people, and year 2000 exodus 
let-my-people-go people.  

"Nation" gets low ratings in any Genius 2000 world because it has too much 
2000 and not enough Genius by half, anymore.

Instead of "nation," we prefer "The worship of God is, Honouring his gifts in 
other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best.  
Those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God."  
Of course, this phrase is also a bit thick with 2000, but most intellectual 
types have a touch of 2000 on the brain.

How about "Albion"?

Max Herman
www.geocities.com/~genius-2000


_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold