virtual speech http://www.alansondheim.org/speech.mp4 earth talks, electrons listen electrons talk, earth listens one electron, many earths sewn together many electrons sewn together, one earth hello i am electron, unlike earth, i have only one part, sob! hello, i am earth, unlike electron, i have many part, but wait say electron, i have many part of you, i am electron say earth, but wait, i am listen Revised revisited notes on Second Life for ELO - speaking and speech and language and talking and writing: 1 In Second Life there may be speaking. Speaking is too close for many people who won't speak but will just use the text chat window. When you hear a voice, you are in the presence of the voice, of the person speaking. You're in the presence of the grain of the voice. You're there. 2 Chat is safer and cooler, and you can paste text in the chat window, you can save the chat dialog. Pasting text allows you to work things out in advance. You can think in advance, just as you do in literature. You can think in advance and someone will read it later, just as if you were speaking it then. Reading text brings the writer up to date for you. Chat can be heterological, wandering, lost; chat is murmured, whispered. You hear chat. 3 You can write interesting scripts that make objects and avatars do things. Interesting scripts are invisible literature; they're under the hood of the virtual world, and you sense them only by what they make things do. You can write things accompanying invisible scripts, things that only people who understand how things work, will be able to read. 4 Scripts are performative language, they carry out things, transform bits and bites into the visible. You never see the skeleton of the virtual world, you never read its literature, only its affect, its effect. 5 Objects may have signs above or below them, objects may be inscribed with writing, and with writing, you can create narratives and literature out of objects. You can have objects which are video-textured. In one user interface, an entire region has a single object texture that can present specific video; the video can have text, voices, anything. In the newer interface, different objects can have different textures that can present different videos, all competing for bandwidth; these videos likewise can present both sight and sound, written words and spoken words. Your region can swallow the world with enough bandwidth, and everything can be heard or seen, one doesn't know where to turn. 6 Almost everything in the virtual and real world is always inscribed, and even in physical reality, there are no "natural" organisms that are not tended, are unintended, are not tended to. 7 In a virtual world, everything is inscribed and of the ontology and epistemologies of inscriptions, codes protocols, and so forth. And this inscription is dynamic, on the move, continually transformed by users and corporate entities, by hackers and operating systems, and so forth. In the physical world, the real is inert, obdurate. In the physical world, organisms are inscribed, cultured, acculturated, all the way down; codes exist within potential wells existing for relatively long periods of time. 8 In both worlds we inhabit spaces we do not fully understand - spaces, ontologies, and epistemologies which are fundamentally alien - which are always already inscribed elsewhere and elsewhen. 9 Every organism is a literature, its language the economy of the imagin- ary. >From http://yoshikaze.blogspot.com/ re my residency in Second Life: "SL without language - that is to say, unspoken and unspeaking objects, objects unspoken-for, these objects parallel the diegeses of silent cinema - moving among them, but then what? what are the moments of narrative or other devices conveying meaning, other than design, etc. So language is critical, and there are signs/signboards everywhere, not to mention notes handed (down) to one upon entering SL - all this. But if language inheres to the object, if the object is always already inscribed, the possibilities open up perhaps? So on one hand, there are speaking objects, and on the other, objects with inscribed textures. The latter can be stationary signs/signboards; they can also be (in SL 2 viewers) videos separately assigned to separate surfaces, or objects in their entirety. In both cases, it appears as if the objects were speaking, were in some sense linguistic - as if language were in the world, not so much of, or beyond, it." _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
