First thing i did was to immerse myself in the world of Machinima groups in SL. I started from the Machinima Wiki that gives a general list of resources.  To my surprise there was much more than I thought.

Some groups are proper large hubs of expertise like the Machinima Institute that counts hundreds of members and comes with SIM full of resources to help you through all the technicalities, from story boarding to post production and distribution. To be honest I found the groups quite lame, I tried to chat to people and all i got was them directing me to the SIM and uploading the technical material. I was told to sign up to be part of a production, however to date I haven’t been called for anything. It seems the the whole industry was very active in 2006, when the whole machinima exploded, but after that the number of  large institutional productions had dropped and remains low. 

These groups are very organized, some are set up on a project-specific basis, like for organizing the production of a film. Others are divided by type of roles. There are some groups for machinima actors, where you sign up and get called to perform in one of features, obviously you get paid an hourly rate. Some features place ads in groups and look for experienced SL life users for their movies. 

The interesting thing for me was that this very much mimics the production process of a real feature film. The fact that it is so much cheaper seems to excite a lot if film makers and actors to launch themselves in a machinima career. Another interesting thread to follow in this research is to analyze what type of acting skills are required in SL and how these are different than in first life.  I would love to see theathre productions in SL… I think this is its great potential compared to animation, the fact that “live” stuff can exist and is going to be weird, because of the mediation by the digitalization of it. So far I came across the Salt Satyagraha walk and I loved it.

Failing my ambition to make it in the Machinima Hollywood equivalent, I have decided to go through the route of the *independent film-making* and as every independent, I had to resize my ambitions and pull out the cash. 

I have story-boarded an hybrid film at the border with documentary. Because I cannot rely much on the actors (you know, they are vain and volatile), I have imagined to only have one avatar that had to be special to attract attention of other people so I could film them. I have commissioned my friend in Milan who by coincidence has some skin shops in Second life and makes avatars of celebrities, to build the avatar of Barack Obama. I got Kevin to accept to manouvre him and I’ve asked the guy who built the Obama SIM in SL where  I shot the elction night documentary, to provide the settings. 

To date I have yet not filmed the pieces, but everything is ready to go… I guess I just need time…

Because I do not like questionnaires and given the ethnographic spirit of this research, I have adopted a very phenomenological approach. I have been showing the clips to various people in my circle of friends and family and encouraged conversations about the material than I then logged. Some of these people I can define as highly media literate, they were aware of Second Life and 3D interactive animation (video games etc), had been users of one of these platform at some stage in life and have previously seen or heard of machinima. Other were familiar with videogames but did not know Second Life or had heard of it but never used it, they general media literacy was average to high, not really different from mine. Some others had basic digital media literacy that generally stops with surfing the internet, using email and mobile phone. My parents and some of my Italian friends can be defined as such.  

I have noted that different levels of media literacy have influenced the way in which everyone was responding to the machinima clips.  I was expecting from people that have little of no experience in interactive 3D animation to confuse machinima clips with cartoons or other graphic type of animation. This was obviously the case if I presented the material without any explanation. My mother for instance thought they were cartoons and even joked about the fact that I am still “playing around with children’s stuff”.  My father said my doc was “very beautiful”, from which I understood that he liked the graphics (probably he found the avatars pleasant to watch as most of them were presenting some aesthetic patterns that seem very much in line with Italian ideas of beauty… symmetry, general comformism etc), but also the expression “it’s beautiful” in Italian can mean much more than just aesthetically pleasant. Not surprising what is “bello” for an Italian is also good (the legacy of the Renaissance), so it implies a wider value judgement. Maybe he appreciated the doc because it related to US elections or because it seemed to make sense to him.  After these initial comments I have steared the conversations to the fact that those avatars are manouvred by people. Even this point did not seem to interest them that much, they politely reiterated that everything was “very interesting” but I did not seem to have hit any string here. I think virtual worlds do not belong to their experiences, somehow they do not mean much to them as they came to mean for us.I remember thinking that maybe I should have insisted and explain the whole thing about virtuality and reality and what having real people moving around animated world can mean. Although I have done this job of “contemporarization of my family” before (i.e. with drugs, sexuality, race etc) i smelt the fatigue and physical strain that it usually takes me to break through these “walls”, and i gave up. I better keep my energy to fight other educational battles like race and sexuality. Virtuality is just not that important. One thing I learned during this course is that ethnographic research requires a lot of time and a lot of energy.

My friends with some average media literacy found the whole thing of filming into a video game, a very amusing thing. Again their reaction seems a function of this. They have been the ones that generated the most enthusiastic responses. “Oh my God, was there really an Obama world ??? was he actually there himself with an avatar? did he build the world to get votes? (from my friend C)” They obviously loved the idea of turning the camera to the screen, I guess more because they do not seem to have enough time / energy to participate to a virtual world, but they would like to know more about it. These people (that represent the highest amount of people I have spoken to about machinima) found the documentary side of machinima very interesting, they wanted to know more about Second Life and what is there, what are people doing. Given the hassle of having to learn a new software, they preferred the documentary/machinima form to explore these worlds. This initial interest directed most of these friends to watch the “emergent second life” TV program that I participated into. Again their feedback was very positive and excited and let them with a wish to know more. The clips stimulated the same endless conversations that we had in class about identity, virtual vs real, power, economy etc.  This group of people did not seem to very interested in the fantasy machinima clips that I showed. “These clips loose the value of documentation and return back towards animation/cartoons. (from my friend P)”.

I have thought about the fact that to be able to appreciate a certain aesthetic, this needs to have come to your personal experience already. Only after the usage of a medium, this can turn into aesthetic language. The parallel with electronic music is extremely clear to me. We had to go through decades of alarm clocks, computer clicks, various blips and blops played by our electrical appliances to be able to welcome those sounds in music. We had to spend years in industrial sites listening to the loud repetitive banging of pistons and turbines to be able to dance to it.  Language is something that humans seem to gather from their environments. They turn their worlds into art, like in a magic alchemist’ work here the elements are taken from the world around us.  This concept is to me extremely interesting because it introduces the process of the *aesthetization of the real*, a process that seems to be associated with post modernity and digital technology but that to me can be applied to human history as a whole. The ground here is extremely rich and I am going to explore it further next semester to see whether I find some interesting angle for a thesis.  The theoretical framework that I should start from to me begins with Kant and his “Critique” and has to pass through the history of Aesthetics. 

Another group of people whose judgement is meaningful for the sake of this research is the one that i would define as “cronic Second Life users”.  There is a large usage of Second Life machinima produced by and for SL residents. I guess it has become part of their “Second Life” to document themselves, just as digital cameras have become fundamental in our first lives. The Second Life group in Flickr has over 8,700 members and if you  type “Second Life” on the Flickr search engine you get over 96,000 photos / videos. Youtube gives you back 38,500 videos. You can do the same for Halo3, WWC, Tomb Raider etc etc.  This must mean something. See my post on production for more insight into how all this production is being generated and why (sorry Jason, it’s the only why i used!)

for more of amywilson work, click on the photo

One that particularly interested me was this photo of a watercolor of a Second Life Sim… how’s that for remediation ?!  This lady who i’ll refer to as “A” from Jersey city, who claims in her profile to be “female and taken” has created a whole lot of watercolors of Second Life (click on the image for more). To me this is the next stage of machinima in way, when a certain aesthetic is absorbed at a certain level of depth of experience, it starts filtering out of your first life aesthetics.  I am thinking of the dreams I used to have in Tomb Raider’s world… It is not a strange fact, and to me establishes a very strong link between aesthetics and identity. We are what we see / eat / make love to etc etc If more and more the world around us is made of colorful pixels, we start producing art and dreams that include that world’s aesthetic.

As a method of investigating the responses to machinima from the “cronic SL users” group, I have looked at the comments on the photos and videos that are published on these sites.  This is to me a great use of the feedback capabilities that Web 2.0 provides. Also given the great linkage between posts, comments and groups, I was able to let myself go and follow random threads. For example Z. writes to A’s watercolor photo: “Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Second Life – is REAL!, and we’d love to have this added to the group! “. I obviously went to check out this group who’s founding intent is to use SL photos to investigate what is reality and how is Second Life as real as reality. An interesting way of doing so is also in the specification that “The essence of this group is NOT about ‘realistic’ snapshots from Second Life®!” !

This is my first take on my final project. I finished editing the small documentary of election night that I filmed in the Obama Sim in Second Life. 

I tried to work on the concept of “remediation”, referencing one medium to another, one type of aesthetic, the one of documentary, to the one of video game platforms and TV .

I pointed the camera to the computer screen and to the TV and by doing so i was surprised to find new spaces that I would not think could possess such depth of field.  I guess i have always seen the “screen” as a flat surface, a mechanical instrument, moving in two dimensions… but it suddenly became something more, a multi-dimensional space made of information patterns in constant motion, always shifting its reference to the *outside world*. This relationship of the content in the screen to another “space” is what interested me deeply… a space that I would have called the Real World before all the Hayles’ and the Shaviros’, the discussions in class and my direct experience in Second Life, but that now is just the same world, just more manipulated, deconstructed and reconstructed.

This perennial man made work of construction and destruction of images, discourse, interactions very often referred to as the Virtual World, seems to me now a very natural one… not different from the process of synthetizing energy from sunlight that plants have, or the annual melting and re-hardening of snow into rivers or glaciers. 

My ethnographic approach to Second Life as a new media platform, fuelled by the semester’s readings have strengthened my belief that nature extends to the man made world and its constructions much more than we generally believe.  This is valid also to discourse. Does it make sense to talk about cultural discourse versus genetic / organic / scientific construction ? Is an idea different to a protein sequence in a plant DNA ? Eventually as discoveries about the brain progress, this distinction is going to melt away. I was reading somewhere that we have isolated the chemical changes in the brain that relate to experiences, memories, traumas etc.  Culture’s chemical impact is therefore already given.

Furthermore if we accept an epistemology of pattern and information as Bateson and Hayles have suggested, then the difference is only of formal / organizational value.  Our brain seems to need categories to navigate the world in the same way bats need radars, but we should always remember to remove them when we move to higher ontological questions.

Coming back to my Machinima work in Second Life it seemed to me that the screen is particularly interesting because of its dual function of containing and being contained by *the outside world*, or better by the flow of life….that flow that we have seen theorized by Shaviro and Tsing.  

Whilst filming I had my lap top on a coffee table in a room full of friends, the TV on, beside me.  My attention was moving constantly between these 3 spaces that in that very night happened to be operating in sync. The election event provided a strong link amongst the three ‘situations’ and made the connection amongst these very real and obvious. The voices and sounds in the film move across these worlds and overlap. Sometimes the voices of my friends in the room provide depth to the Second Life avatars, whilst the TV breaks through providing direction to these collective performances as results are cheered, commented, referenced throughout.

Whilst operating the camera through this very unusual environment, I remembered a part of “Sans Soleil” by Chris Marker where the camera’s attention moves from the streets of Tokyo to the TV screen in the author’s dark impersonal hotel room. Suddenly the world of the room enlarges to reach the whole of Japan… the screen becomes a gateway to another experience of the country, mediated and re-written in televised form… or like Gregory Bateson would say quoting Bertrand Russel, a difference of *logical types*.

This difference is only a difference in level of abstraction, an aesthetic language that is superimposed on the usual non-man-made universe, so not a mere difference of substance.   Reality is an image, over an image, over an image. My work on memory [see my previous videos and papers part of "Layers"] done last year appears very much in tune with this concept. Memory is itself a virtual reality, as Shaviro rightly points out, formed by superimposition of different layers that interact with existing ones and are constantly changing (“we are constantly re-writing history as much as history is re-written” – Chris Marker, Sans Soleil).

When editing the footage I have tried to understand the difference between the TV image of the CNN anchorman and the one of the avatars in Second Life. Whilst the TV image is still very compliant to reality, the avatar is a sort of human abstraction. It does have human features (at least the majority has) but more in a puppet sort of way. Wanting to reference this analysis to Pierce semiotic guidelines, I would say that an avatar has some iconic value, together with being also indexical in the way photographic images of people are. Infact I find very difficult to see what dominant semiosis is typical of an avatar. It’s not totally indexical because by looking at my avatar no one can really work out my real features… however it is still me and operated by me… without me, my avatar would not exist or walk around or meet other people, which makes it also very indexical. 

Have we hit a semiotic double bind ? or is it just the same old stuff ?  This is one of the questions that I will investigate throughout my final project.

Yet some interesting points in what I see as an attempt to move the concept of *embodied knowledge* that we saw in Hayles to the larger spectrum of the ‘body of science’. Latour wants to re-write the epistemology of science in such a way that it accounts for all the missing parts (or secondary qualities), the different *layers* that constitute the phenomonological part of experience.

He propose articulation as the epistemological tool, the path of accounting for all the *layers of differences* that make reality such a complex matter, impossible to reduce by simplification. “The more you articulate controversies, the wider the world becomes”. Again Gregory Bateson somehow pops up in my head – in his way of preaching the need for a new epistemology to navigate this complexity and choosing a context based solution to the dilemma. The history of science seems therefore to be evolving. We needed to fix certain assumptions about reality to proceed deeper into things and now we need to set those assumptions free and include them in the system as “movable parts”.

The world according to Latour is again a very post-modern world, a “multiverse” made of layers of reality in which knowing the world means standing inside, participating, *learning by being affected*, allowing reality to pass through, our bodies like filters… where inevitably they loose their subjectivity, or better they add themselves to the composition of infinite layers.  Massumi and Deleuze come to mind here, reality as a continuous construction of different forces, glued together by affect, intensity.

Some of the considerations about science needing to be interesting and risky I found unnecessary. Is there really the need to state this?  That there are better scientific results with fecundity, originality, creativity, etc, we maybe knew already. I don’t want to believe that traditional science would require boring unimaginative efforts… In these parts, I sense that latour is ranting more than focusing on the more justifyied criticism to objectivity, distance, detachment of scientific method.

Another good point is about the tendency of obeying to scientific authority. Disputability is something that is needed in any epistemological effort, and I have always noticed this blind trust in what is deemed scientific, despite the fact that scientific assumptions and laws are continualy being challenged and made obsolte by further discoveries.

In this effort Latour’s wants to bring forward Stengers and Despret’s message that this new extensive methodology of science does not mean that the criteria of judgement have become looser, on the contrary he stresses the fact that BECAUSE OF THIS COMPLEXITY, it is very difficult and rare to have good science, in the same way it is of having good art.

more later…

“The virtual without the body is empty; the body without the virtual is blind”.

When approaching this week’s assignment for my Emerging Media & Documentary class, this concept hit me. We were asked to go out there and document election night – in any way or form we could find interesting. Most of my classmates were excited about taking a camera and going to the streets to upload fragments and samples of real life into their Facebook profiles or Flickr accounts, i.e. *connect* those to the network. I was reluctant. Why would you want to do that given there will be millions of people doing the same thing? After reading Shaviro’s book and remembering Elizabeth Ellsworth’s words from wednsday’s class, I can articulate an explanation of this neurotic obsession with over-documentation that i so had a problem with some time ago. It is not about documentation, it is about being *there* – it is not about wanting to represent something (there was no risk that this election was not going to be over-represented) but about survival itself, it’s a desperate cry for existance. It annoys me in the way any as other aggressive manifestations of somebody’s else persona.  To be is to be perceived. Word.

My approach to this project was to use this concept but reverse its direction of flow. Instead of uploading RL into the web, I wanted to dive in and bring stuff *OUT* of the network, re-work it, manipulate it and leave it there or place it back *IN*. I therefore turned my video camera TO THE SCREEN. The computer. The television. I am working through this material as we speak but I am pleased with the results. Eventually I managed not only to bring things OUT but to capture different layers of perception. Reality and Virtuality are so mixed and interwined together that it’s impossible to detect the differences. One of the outcomes is this small doc I am editing about election night in the OBAMA SIM in SL. I report only some screenshots and no audio, but these are enough to raise some questions in Shaviro’s style about what is considered *virtual* and what *real*. The people I spoke to and with whom I shared some of the tension and the celebrations, are REAL people…they are just meeting in a different place. Paraphrasing Shaviro: “[in the network society] proximity no longer is determined by geographical location…”

When starting this book I felt a strange feeling of de-ja-vu`.  Shaviro takes Hayles’ textual analysis of literature, specially SciFi, and adds his own bits & pieces of films, social theories, philosophy, financial markets economics, in a similar style to Anna Tsing… throwing everything in the big broiling pot of post-modern research methods… spitting out a blob of various concepts presented in the most fragmented of “literary” and/or “academic” forms.

And it works. At least for me.

Content aside, I have to say that this methodology of investigation and its forms of presentation is very accessible. Maybe because, as Shaviro explains, we are ourselves post-modern and deeply embodied in this digital network society where concentration is volatile, connections among things and ideas are flaky, linearity is so last century and time is lost in space. 

The result is that I did not struggle to read this book, i could pick it up anytime at any page and still understand it. The brief sections kept my [very flimsy] focus alive, the reference to literature and film helped me *visualizing* some pretty tough phylosophical ideas and stimulated a constructivist approach where new layers of connections kept of coming up in my head and mixing with the material. I agree with Sean that you could easily adapt this book to a web-based structure.  I wonder whether my father might struggle to follow Shaviro through this labirynth. Given that he can read Proust like I read comic strips, he would probably be ok. ‘La Reserche`” being the literary representation of memory, seems a very post-modern type work, and after all ‘memory is a kind of virtual reality’ itself. Maybe I have a post-modern father.

One thing I have to agree with Chester. The cultural bias is strong here, in the same way I think it also was strong in Tsing’s Friction. Who makes the judgement about what is positive and what is negative? I’m thinking about the reference to Castell and his view of financial derivatives. With the financial crisis we are hearing more and more attacks and attempts at demonizing these financial instruments. As i worked on those for 8 years, I can say that we are making the same mistakes we made for drugs. Drugs (and derivatives) are not bad tools “per se”… they are actually amazing results of the sophistication of our society and our technological development. They open a huge range of new opportunities but are RISKY stuff and need to be handled properly. The “flow” of speculative capital in the form of options, collars, swaps, CDSs etc has allowed a great deal of re-distribution of income around the world. I keep on fighting this very strong political bias, post marxist legacy, that I keep hitting my head against in the social sciences that the world is a much worse place now that it was 100, 200, 500, 1000 years ago. BULLSHIT. Plain political propaganda. Go and live in Europe throughout the 1400, 1600, 1800, 1900…we were slaughtering each other endlessly… go to tribal Africa, they were eating themselves… or dieing of disease and infection at the age of 35. Humanity [unfortunately for the environment] is doing very well.   Even Africa is not as bad as it was during its tribal times and has benefited by this “connection”.  Colonialism is still strong but is it as bloody as it was 500 years ago? (i just went to this town in Bolivia, where an estimate of 9 MILLION local people and slaves died to extract silver for the mines and give it to the Spanish!). Of course there are a lot of very wrong things, and I’m with Chomsky when he says that capitalism itself is not really bad but it becomes so because it rewards the wrong people – or as I would add: it isn’t sufficiently sophisticated to price in less material but very important effects, like environmental and social “happiness”. So wrong for me on the political bias side. But nevertheless, this was still a great book. On the other hand, when I speak to bankers, all I get is the same one sided view of opposite sign, which makes me think that we need much more cross-fertilization if we really want to get over the silos. 

Amongst the tons of interesting threads, one keeps on going around in my head and validates previous discussions in this class and in others: The realization that subjectivity in such an integral and unified sense is being dismantled – By bringing forward Leibnitz’s monads into the flowing network, Shaviro is able to provide a strong theoretical basis to the idea of multiple personalities. “Drugs like technology are capable of dispersing subjectivity”. Shaviro is extreme in the sense that he does not even accept a federal solution, i.e.  a ”self as a system of interacting conscious and unconscious parts always in motion and in direct contact with the *outside world* by means of the sensorial system” in the way C. G. Jung did, or Gregory Bateson’s and Hayles’ system of intelligent Mind. There is no self in the networked society but only an aggregate of dystopic, randomly connected personae.  In such world aesthetics defines identity and identity is fragmented, multiple, in a constant process of being re-written.  An avatar like another mask (see already quoted play by Pirandello “One, No-one and hundred thousands), a necessary social camouflage to get in yet another social system of virtual worlds, but even more one on of the many monads of personality that contribute to the definition of that being in a given place at a given time. “Zelig” by Woody Allen comes to mind – the *kameleon man* who changes his physical and mental features to conform and be accepted in a given social group.

Other very interesting topics that I do not have the time and space to review but that I would like to mention and keep alive in my memory were the concept of singularity (Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odissey would be my first link) as “difference that makes a difference” in Batesonian terms, the transformation of femininity in a hyper-real, hyper-visible world, the linear interface of “consciousness operating on a non-linear unconscious platform”. Memory [and I add dreams] as a virtual networked world, etc etc

Word.

We are obviously dealing with a reality that is becoming more and more complex and Tsing seems concerned that the tools at our disposal are not capable of properly capturing all the interconnections and related forces that operate in the construction of history. In this respect, what amazed me of her work is the sheer amount of interdisciplinary knowledge required to analyze such a context. She juggles notions of economics, global finance, anthropology, biology, geology, politics, psycology, literature, etc… in a way that if not academically rigorous, is at least super comprehensive.

It is interesting to see how her style also plays a part in rendering these interconnections by ranging from informed journalistic tones to passionate poetic ones using a wide mix of literary “moods” and technical jargon.

Does this mean that we are reacting to complexity with more complexity?

I think so and I think this is a good.  Maybe we are truly moving away from a *silo-infused* ontology, where specialization and categories have been made more porous; where the researcher has to master different disciplines and develop the sensitivity to look beyond the specific field of study.

This is very interesting to me because I feel I sit across a lot of different *cultural* silos and I truly struggle to define myself. This coming Saturday I will participate in a discussion group where I will be asked to introduce myself and *define* what I do and what I am.  I have been thinking about this very point all day. and having read “Friction” I am curious to see how Anna Tsing defines herself or is defined. A glance at web entries do not help as she is generally labeled as *anthropologist*. But is she ? or at least , is she ONLY that ?

The book is definitely not ONLY written from the perspective of an anthropologist. My ex boss could have written the paragraph on Bre-X and he is a banker. And so on for all the other chapters… I think this is interesting. It reminds me what a “scholar” or an “artist” were few centuries ago. Leonardo is a great example of this *convergence* culture. He was an artist and an engineer, a mechanic, a poet etc. Dante had to know both poetry and political economics very well to write the Divine Commedy.

Maybe we are heading back to that sort of world.

Friction is a good book, it is deeply informative, and speaks to a wide variety of audience. Is this what scolarly research has to be like ? Probably not, but do we care ? Do we need to get rid of categories and specialization and rigorous traditional academia ? I would say not as there is value in the way this can take us very deep into something. But we need to listen to all the voices, use all the possible tools.

What I aspire to do in my work is to sit in front of the *unknown material* with a widely open mind and the best varied set of tools I can get around me… and crack down that open in the best possible way.

Still very unsure of what angle and framework I want to use for this research, but I have drafted some ideas.

I am interested in this new genre of cinematography that has born out of the increased sophistication of video gaming tachnology and virtual 3D platforms.

The spread of high definition screen capturing technology and the high interactivity rate of virtual presence have allowed a new way of doing cinematography.

Platforms like Second Life, War of warcraft and other video games are attracting a large number of film makers.  machinima is a n example of how these new techniques are filtering into the film and documentary genres and are creating a 3rd intermidiary level of cinematography that sits between traditional film and animation.

Like with animation, this new genre moves into a virtually drawn world, however, like film, the acting is performed live by biological carachters through the use of avatars.

A sort of hybrid, a puppetteers cinema that speaks the new aesthetics of the digital age together with the immediacy and warmth of human performance.

Apart of the huge commercial possibilities (machnima studios are replacing expensive animation technologies, specially for action films) I am interested in understanding how this new aesthetics that strictly combines real and virtual lives, is being used by artists and filmmakers.

Can a new aesthetics and language come out of this or are we transferring in a virtual reality the same aestethic patterns of “real” productions?

Any comments are welcome….

I suggest watching the web episodes of Alva Molotov, one of the most successful virtual cinematography examples and highly inspiring for my project.

http://www.cinemax.com/molotov-alva/index.html

Discussions that continued when my friend Susannah went for her MBA and became a big supporter of the concept. I remember the long slow lunches after a drunk night of Barcelona night life with her and Suzanne trying to argue all the possible point pro and against. Never really managed to form a clear opinion of it. As Tsing says, how do you go and investigate a phenomenon that crosses wide cultural landascapes, is constantly in motion, is so full of contradictions.

From a methodological point of view, Tsing seems to operate a “fragmented ethnography”. Instead of looking at one defined cultural context, she looks a the relations and connections, the threads that develop in one particular location, the actors that move around the scene and that are attached to very diverse “zones of cultural function”.

The human pool that Tsing analyses is a typical product of a globalized economy. Travellers, NGOs, large corporations, root-less local enterprehuners, indigenous populations, plants, animals, rocks, natural resources.

This type of system is of extreme complexity and the point she makes about the impossibility of planning possible outcomes of an event, seems extremely relevant now, where from a bunch of bad Californian mortgages, we have ended up in the largest and darker recession since 1929.

Is there a way to avoid a sistuation of “runway”, another frequently used [Gregory] Bateson’s concept that comes at hand here, that point of no return in which pathology spreads to system and is amplified by its very interconnections and flows. 

Tsing looks at this system and these connection in a way that I think is interesting. She points out that this whole capitalistic system that we have created is not perfect and in most cases difficult to manage.  The weakness of the system can be also its own cure. We can take advantage of interaction, crosses of interests and “encounters” generated by this whole monstruos apparatus, to engage and have and impact in it. It is a constant movement of people, actions, ideas, investments that converge on a small territory, swallowing people and resources, a human tsunami that hits a small island somewhere in the Indonesia, but also bringing help, resistance, new ideas.

The only thing I though was a little wrong was Tsing wish to restrict her research to the disaster angle. Why?

…more later…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7666836.stm

Hard times for artificial intelligence… they are still quite stupid compared to us. Interesting link to the post-human and the concept of embodied knowledge.