mvuent

Void Dweller
i really like the idea of this thread. sadman "sandman" barty mostly stuck with ideas he personally came up with in the OP, but i think we can go even bigger.

here are some of mine that may not have entered the lexicon yet, but are sure to catch on any day now:
- yearning for the algorithmic
- fog of war
- proper tunes vs soundscapes
- farlands music
- surreal house
- obscured epics (underdeveloped)

a few other people had as well:
- audio animation (more widely known by barty’s term: cartoon physics)
- impossibility / magic / new psychedia (a notion shared by treelethary and thirdform)

a few from version :
- revealing the map
- into the sewers
- the hall of mirrors
- the surface

a few from other_life :
- the chill wave continuum
- the barbarian ideal
- the hermetic church

a few from Corpsey :
- the dramatic
- the sexy pendulum

@thirdform has a lot. not gonna list them because i'm sort of curious which ones he would prioritize

with pattycakes the first i think of is the depths. that’s sort of his mothership it seems to me

i always thought of this playlist from yyaldrin (including his description) in this sense, not sure what a name for it would be

(obviously this is in no way meant as some kind of scoreboard, it's far from definitive and extremely biased towards my own interests. a lot of great concepts omitted. i just thought that with the renewed interest in "making things up" it might be time to add to barty's initial list)
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I did a thread about what I called 'Acid Rap' (not to be confused with Chancer the Rapper's mixtape) which was a spin off of that dematerialisation discussion — almost diagnosing a symptom of dematerialisation in the culture.
 
Corpsey:

"Pantheism - the insight that there is nothing immaterial at any one moment whatever is is material. Forgotten in a time when text messages fly invisibly through space. Alienation from the material world effected through technology. That was what I was getting at with the Wordsworth stuff. Not that there is no phenomena of dematerialisation, but that dematerialisation might come through recognition of the increasingly hidden materiality of the world."

I also get a block with the dematerialisation concept for the same reason. Maybe its just the word, because we can’t get past the connotation of transcendence to some new immaterial realm in the internet age. Rather than the rearrangement of matter, digitsation, accelerating information exchange, despatialisation (deterritorialization?) of culture and distribution channels, long tail off of demand for certain mediums etc etc

"I suppose a small cabal of nerds really understands what's happening, but most of us couldn't explain it, which is okay since we don't give it a second thought."

Is it OK? My lack of understanding of new technology, actually most technology, is often a source of dread. It makes me think about how the widening gap in knowledge between technology creators/owners and the vast majority of technology users is a space that gets filled with fantasy, nostalgia, toys, and where conspiratorial and spiritual ideas proliferate. Sometimes the bottom-up way, explaining the unknown through whats available, basic or naive info myth, storytelling, magic etc. But there’s the top down element, where marketing (names, branding) and the aesthetics of new technology are designed to be familiar, curved edges, infantilisation (touched on here before)

Through necessity maybe (i dont care just make it easy for me to do the thing i want) but it can be seen in a more sinister sense, a means of control and dumbing down, and addiction. In that way the transcendence 'to a new immaterial realm’ or outside time, or back in time to your childhood, can be seen to play to your deepest desires to get you hooked and dependent.
 

luka

Well-known member
I explain the dematerialisation thing in a thread called dematerialisation. essentially what I am getting at is dematerialisation as the ideal end point and unconscious or conscious motivation for a particular line of technological development, exemplified by but not confined to digitalisation. It's not a huge stretch of the imagination to describe, for instance, the step from cassette to cd to MP3 as tracing a line of dematerialisation for instance.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's annoying cos it's so long and fractious and diffuse no one can be bothered reading it, not even me, so it's hard to remember exactly what was said
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
You're right, that is the goal of technology — as an illusion, at the very least.

I don't have a single clue how bluetooth works. I just turn my earbuds on (I want to point out here i'm taling about 20 quid earbuds, not 150 quid apple ones) and accept that somehow the music jumps through the air into my ears. But then, I also didn't understand how it worked when there were wires - but it seemed more palpable, at least. There was a physical connection.

Of course, there still IS a physical connection. It's just invisible and intangible to us.

Reminds me of a book I read not long ago 'ten short lessons about physics'. A lot of stuff in there about how most of what is going on is completely imperceptible to us.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I suppose there are some physical things we savour and want to keep - obvious examples being eating food and fucking.

But there are a whole raft of physical things that we mainly experience as impediments or discomfort/pain.

Exercising (one in a blue moon) has taught me that these struggle-processes are often the route to wellbeing. But then, if we could just have that wellbeing chemically induced in our brains without having to run up a massive hill, would we still want the struggle part?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Of course, there still IS a physical connection. It's just invisible and intangible to us.

And the end-goal of technological design is to try to make the unpalatable parts imperceptible to us.

We want to be able to listen to music, but we find it inconvenient to have a bunch of wires around. There might be a point beyond which we'd be uncomfortable going - say, if we didn't even have to stick earbuds in, the music just appeared in our heads — that would be very convenient but would we find it too strange? There might be some comfort in having something physical to put in to our ears first.

Reminds me of something I read about how the internet is so fast now that website designers actually program delay in — because if things loaded as fast as they actually could we'd feel somehow cheated or confused, as if something must have gone wrong for nothing to need to load.
 
I explain the dematerialisation thing in a thread called dematerialisation. essentially what I am getting at is dematerialisation as the ideal end point and unconscious or conscious motivation for a particular line of technological development, exemplified by but not confined to digitalisation. It's not a huge stretch of the imagination to describe, for instance, the step from cassette to cd to MP3 as tracing a line of dematerialisation for instance.

ive read the thread. I know what you’re getting at. im drawing a connection between the “unconscious motivation for a particular line of technological development” and dualistic ideas of transcendence. Stuff explored by Erik Davis and probably cybernetics?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Thanks @mvuent for the like (y)

It's definitely akin to monkeys grooming each other, isn't it? Aside from the (miniscule but compelling enough) ego boost of getting a 'like', there's also a social cohesion thing going on. Which would also explain why it can feel alienating to not get likes if others are.
 
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