BEN CERVENY + BENJAMIN BRATTON CONVERSATION
Philosophy - Technology - Science Fiction → 3 come together
Browser Window → a human facing container of lots of protocols
Monopoly vs. emergent standard (GU)
Model of the real world vs. forget about the real world, build another world → Linked back world vs. Gnostic world
Notion of the prime material plane
“Quantitative analysis has left the building of humans.”
Technology is everything that happens after you are born. Everything before is just stuff...
The pastoralization of technology
The avant-garde’s role in capitalism as the first wave of things to be exploited
Being ok with the static frame from the bigger node-storm
“The static view is a jailed window”
Information architect / application designer → role has shifted
The perspective itself is the design
Which of this hyper rotational pivots do you want to engage
Notion of the signal-to-noise ratio
Yahoo: The last portal... → Never saw itself as a platform, saw themselves as a media aggregation
Data visualisation → a way to look at the ocean rather than the drop of water... (but doesn’t remove you from the discipline of data editorialization)
It’s no longer Journalism ↔ Data visualization , the data visualization is the journalism
The architecture of a concept model
Architecture has always been the practice of building a cult to spend lots of resources to build something that may or may not exist in their lifetime
Architecture → used to be the biggest pitch-making industry in the world (now this role has been taken over by Tech Sector)
Concept Model ↔ Cult Building
Introduction of the iPhone, lots of introductions:
Assumption that always with us, technology always with us
A object that has all functions
Even though the object surrenders its function to the network, the object retains its fetish (surprising, actually...)
The performance is no longer curation, the performance is action (taking the selfie, etc.)
Once you make technology into verbs, the verbs that rise to the top are the ones that gives immediate satisfaction to the lizard cortex, primitive needs like validation or instant gratification
Controlling the vocabulary of verbs
The possibility of building a pipeline
Spaces that had “nouns” & “verbs”, the semantics of spaces and how they recombine as experiences
Game design → creation of the semantic model
Notion of structure information
Data visualisation is representational
Visualization producing the concept model
Apps as specific simulation, grouping nouns/verbs into specific activations
A culture of peer produced simulation design
Disney → narrative universe world, great power
World ↔ Instances within it
Notion of instantiations, views into the model, narrative views, self-rationalizing rule spaces
A lighting strikes of narrativization inside universe
Sub-sculptures, choices into constraints
Super-potential and carving out instances, understanding the value of instantiations
Things are excreted, something in the metabolism
The role of “model tending, keeping it alive” → power of this has been realized
One person is the sculptor (story, application, building)
Other person is the one feeding the universe, maintain the world, keeping track of it
i.e. process becomes understood as less than act of genius or intuition, process becomes more formalised
How to socket ontologies into simulation systems
Notion of a “Model Architect”
Games are the only place that we have a popular representation of complex adaptive systems → tools that are as close as possible to understanding metabolism, the city
First build scopes and then build expressions
Culture of the new, fetishization of novelty
Changing fashion of what being a consumer in this space
What the return to the fashionability in the literacy of complexity (curation) with these tools, rather than the duck face immediate response in these apps?
Any attempt at looking at nth dimensional data is filtration
Sculpture in the possibility space (OG)
Decision graph of A.I. / machine learning process also exposed
AI as a platform of instrumentality
A surface for instrumentation
Treads becoming Braids → weaving in different frequencies, different valences