2021-11-29

Web space (this, trans.fail) is more or less reworked. The system is in place. PHP, CSS, HTML. Made me think how long have I been working in PHP on and off. Code code code. Web, net, cyberspace.

Been reading. Remember NETPORN reader/conference in 2005/2007? I haven't followed then, but their reader (free PDF download) has something that stuck in my mind yesterday:

[...] throughout the essay, I shall be making the dis- tinction between the use of the words Internet and cyberspace. While the Internet refers to the technology that binds several networks through a single access protocol, cyberspace is borrowed from William Gibson’s definition in his novel Neuromancer. Gibson coined the term cyberspace and defined it as something more than a network: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. […] A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system”. Gibson’s notion of cyberspace was necessarily interactive and agential. The ‘consensual hallucination’ is a deliberate act of creation of the space and of the self. The ‘sense of who’ is firmly connected to the ‘sense of where’ within cyberspaces. This interactive nature, and the embodiment of the self in the space are crucial in my deployment of the notion of cyberspace.

-- Nishant Shah in PlayBlog: Pornography, Performance and Cyberspace

Gibson's notion of cyberspace was .. interactive and agential. This is very different from the idea of what Internet is today. I find this distinction extremely important. It's something that has always been the main pull towards going back online, making connections in an active interchange. That's what was always striking to me: exchange of worlds, the communication, the simultaneous existence of the imaginary and material stimula over the network, carried by information, but transformed into feelings and images and sensations, existing here and there differently and forging a third world, somewhere in-between.

Of course, strict materialism is necessary. But also transcedental empiricism:

Deleuze’s philosophy is an empiricism because like Epicurus and Locke he begins with sensibility as a response to shock from outside, and because like James and Dewey, relations are empirical and discovered by affect. Deleuze proposes to establish empiricism “transcendentally,” that is, immanently, without introducing anything beyond experience and what can be deduced of its empirical genesis. Transcendental empiricism is a more consistently empirical empiricism. It is also James’s radical empiricism reinterpreted through the eyes of a uniquely acute student of European philosophy. He presents an alternative to classical ideas of identity and difference. Reversing Plato, difference is original, positive, and aboriginally multiple, a virtual pre-individuality from which empirical distinctions emerge. Overcoming original identity is a boon to a more consistent empiricism because all experience arises from relational features of milieus, where the tenor of experience is difference and relation, not the same and self-identical.

-- Barry Allen: Empiricisms: Experience and Experiment from Antiquity to the Anthropocene

There's a lot of work to do. I have a plan, but the premiere of this iteration is nearing faster and faster and I'm on the edge.

Soon more!