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xirdalium

a blog … in the strict sense of the term …

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zeph in limbo

xirdalium Posted on Thursday, 30th August 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalSunday, 8th July 2012


 

The AK-1RA Sports by Detect Surface in outer space … this is what may happen if you are too daring in “↑Second Life“ (SL) … you will be catapulted into limbo, then into oblivion. I am proud to be able to state, that I am a testpilot with D&D Creative Labs in the (SLurl:) ↑City of Abaddon. I was on a stunt-test-drive with the brandnew bike, visualized by ↑Detect Surface
and scripted by acid Zenith. Suddenly I hit a glitch in the matrix and was blown out into non-space.

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warmy blankies, anthropology, and rain-soaked neon

xirdalium Posted on Wednesday, 29th August 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalFriday, 6th July 2012

william gibson meets bat segundo
 

William Gibson
 

In last year’s ↵writing culture and cyberpunk I tried to show the close kinship of anthropology and cyberpunk—and I never cease to voice my opinion that the cyberpunk writers are huge fans of sociocultural anthropology. Four days ago I received an e-mail from writer, playwright, and director ↑Edward Champion, hinting me to “↑The bat segundo show #133“ [54:42 min | .mp3] featuring an extensive and, to me, very interesting interview with ↑William Gibson … are you ready? Are you hangin’ on the edge of your seat? Well, hold your breath then and have a quote from the godfather of cyberpunk, from the man who invented the concept and the word “cyberspace” … sit down and listen to Mr. William Ford Gibson:
 

I don’t think I really have technological issues. I don’t have technological issues in the sense people are often to meet [?] through my work. I’m not an early adaptor by any means. What always interested me most about technology, is watching people use it. So, I really think I am a sort of anthropologist. You know, I aspire to something like the condition of an anthropologist. [quote starts at 03:20 min]
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massively sculpted

xirdalium Posted on Thursday, 23rd August 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalSunday, 8th July 2012

very first sculptie armour in SL baby :P
 

Those are the moments I enjoy fieldwork online to the max. To the left is ↑Detect Surface, creator-god of (SLurl:) ↑Abaddon. He wears something peculiar—Detect: “very first sculptie armour in SL baby :P” Acid and me independently voiced that involuntarily it worked out as a perfect homage to the original Doom-guy. To the right is Yours Truly, wearing work-in-progress, the prototype-head of a full android, somewhat Terminator-style … things to come … and my body is made as skinny as possible, in order to make it fit seamlessly into the android later on. Our conversation in the very moment of the picture went like that:
 

Zeph: you’re looking so massive against me …
Detect Surface: lol lets not get gay now lol

Another one. Several weeks ago, when Ye-Ole-Japanese-Fishing-Village section of cyberpunk’s incarnation in “↑Second Life“ (SL), the City of Abaddon (my home!), still was under construction by means of the D-man’s virtual hands, we all were standing together at the fish market. Some tourists sightseeing in Abaddon drew near, glanced at us, and one guy went:
 

Random Guy: why are u all armed
Detect Surface: because we live here
Random Guy: ah
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visual phenomena

xirdalium Posted on Thursday, 23rd August 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalFriday, 6th July 2012

The notorious Frankfurter Illusion
 

Is it a eurocentric bias on the visual that the majority of constructivist works start out with optical illusions? I am not sure. But be it as diverse personæ as von Foerster, Watzlawick, Maturana & Varela, or even Francis Crick—Berger & Luckman are an exception—, optical illusions serve as a stunning starter for their arguments. Me personally, I am a downright fanboy of illusions of all kind, hence I am of the opinion, that Alan Sokal’s warning to the social sciences and humanities—not to use metaphors which are way more complicated to understand than the phenomena you want to illustrate by their use—does not kick in here. Although the phenomena in question may have quite complex basis’ or even reasons unknown. Because of their immediacy, almost everybody can experience the phenomena ad hoc, I take optical illusions to hold immense argumentative and didactical value for all things constructivist. Now,
↑Michael Bach collected ↑72 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena on his website and renders them masterfully—especially in this respect online technology has at least one great advantage over printed matter on paper: illusions depending on the moving image can be demonstrated:
 

These pages demonstrate visual phenomena, and “optical” or “visual illusions”. The latter is more appropriate, because most effects have their basis in the visual pathway, not in the optics of the eye. […]
 

“Optical illusion” sounds pejorative, as if exposing a malfunction of the visual system. Rather, I view these phenomena as bringing out particular good adaptations of our visual system to standard viewing situations. These adaptations are “hard-wired” in our brains, and thus under some artificial manipulations can cause inappropriate interpretations of the visual scene. As Purkinje put it: “Illusions of the senses tell us the truth about perception” (cited by Teuber, 1960).
 

Don’t distress yourself if you don’t see the effect described, even if trying carefully. For many illusions, there is a small percentage of people with perfectly normal vision who just don’t see it, for reasons unknown.

Am I allowed to cheaply capitalize on the above? … The small percentage of people who do not see the empirical world at all, but illusions and figments of their own exclusively, are called politicians and bureaucrats.

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he was there

xirdalium Posted on Wednesday, 22nd August 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalSunday, 8th July 2012

William Ford Gibson
 

… and I missed it. On 02 August 2007 the godfather of cyberpunk, ↑William Gibson, publicly read from his freshly published, latest novel “Spook Country”—read live in “↑Second Life“ (SL). The event was ↑staged by Penguin, and on YouTube there are several documentations of it. To my eye the best one is “↑William Gibson enters Cyberspace“ by Munich’s very own musician, composer, and audio producer
↑Bernhard “draxtordespres” Drax. Then there are “↑Gibson reads from Spook Country in SL
“
, “↑Answers from William Gibson in cyberspace“, and “↑Answers from William Gibson in cyberspace part II“—documentations in the strict sense of the term and therefore a bit dull pieces of machinima. Interesting I find the two part interview (“↑Across the Border to Spook Country“, “↑On Second Life and in Second Life“) done by amazon. Let me quote the latter one, where Gibson talks a bit about his first experience in SL last winter:
 

Amazon.com: Have you visited Second Life at all? I know that you’re doing some promotions for the book there.
 

Gibson: I’m going to do something there, and it’ll pretty much be the first time I’ve been there since I did go and check it out last winter. It was a strange experience.
 

Amazon.com: Did they treat you as a god there?
 

Gibson: Well, you know I didn’t go as myself. I went as the guy that I cooked up when I signed up, so nobody knew it was me. And actually it was like a cross between being in some suburban shopping mall on the outskirts of Edmonton in the middle of winter and the worst day you ever spent in high school. [laughter]
 

Amazon.com: Yeah, I have to say I’ve visited the outskirts and it frightens me.
 

Gibson: It’s deserted. It seems like functionally it has to be deserted. If it’s not deserted it crashes. So there’s all this empty, empty architecture. There’s whole cities where there’s only one other person and they don’t even want to get close to you. And when you do succeed in finding a group of other avatars, people aren’t very nice.
 

Amazon.com: They’re meaner than they are–it’s like people are in their cars.
 

Gibson: Yeah, they’re meaner than they are in the real world. There may be other places that I haven’t seen…
 

Amazon.com: If you had said who you were, you would have been one of the popular kids, I imagine.
 

Gibson: Yeah, but then you don’t get to find out what it is. But who would have believed me? [laughter] And who could have know that, because a part of my frosty reception was that I set all of the avatar’s sliders in the opposite direction than I assumed most people would do. So I wound up being this grotesquely overweight, bright blue smurf. In a tutu. Nobody thought that was cool. You know what really worried me about Second Life? It’s that after I’d spent maybe like four or five hours checking it out last December, I was walking around in the Christmas shopping crowds here, and every so often I would see somebody from Second Life walking down the street. There are people, always well under 30, who look like they’ve escaped from Second Life.
 

Amazon.com: They dress like an avatar.
 

Gibson: Yeah, they dress like an avatar, they’re built like an avatar. It’s a very spooky thing. And I think somewhere in my file of lines for fiction there’s one about a guy, his girlfriend looks like he found her in Second Life.

The very last known sentence Gibson spoke in SL so far? … “If you ever run into me in Second Life I hope I won’t look quite so much like Quentin Tarantino.”
 

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visual modernity

xirdalium Posted on Tuesday, 21st August 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalFriday, 6th July 2012


Chris Kelty posted this movie at ↑Savage Minds under the header “↑Understanding Modernity Hiply,“ and commented: “There are some great subtle moments in it. Whoever made it has read far too much ↑Edward Tufte [… of “↑The cognitive style of powerpoint“ fame. See the excerpt “↑PowerPoint Does Rocket Science “].”

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guys in london

xirdalium Posted on Saturday, 18th August 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalFriday, 6th July 2012

Guy Fawkes in London
 

John Lennon in London
 

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imagine

xirdalium Posted on Saturday, 18th August 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalFriday, 6th July 2012

Imagine
 

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
 

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
 

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
 

 
You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine
 

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appropriating paris

xirdalium Posted on Tuesday, 14th August 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalFriday, 6th July 2012

Federal BMX
 

Remember the ↵bombenkrater fusion plus ↵discussion, and my babbling about appropriating urban landscapes ↵by mastership? Well, in Paris ↑they ↑do it, too—of[f] course.
 

via entry at mosaikum
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second first life

xirdalium Posted on Tuesday, 14th August 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalSunday, 8th July 2012

second first life
 

Everybody who ever “set a foot” into “↑Second Life“ (SL), ↑just watch, please.
 

via entry at william gibson
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Cover of 'Cyberanthropology' (Knorr 2011)

You still can find copies of my 2011 book [in German] ↑at amazon. And here are some ↵reviews.


«Ceci, Messieurs, disait-il, c’est du Xirdalium, corps cent mille fois plus radioactif que le radium.»
—Jules & Michel Verne 1908

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