Author: Walter

Posted on

Sociometry of the Internet

Web Intersections Later: Sunday, 7 September, 2008 – dead – I can’t make much sense of the Archive either.

I am having an exploration of the blog indexing situation. This site seems to provide some overview. Headlines of a sort, but they emerge sociometrically from the world, well, in this case from a handful of bloggers via tomandian. Moreno called it a Matrix a long time ago. The tools for tapping into the global sociometry – search engines do it but now the finest mesh of the net is being carefully analysed – by tools and humans.

Amazing to see how popular the Mozilla release 1.0 is today! This is great news.

Posted on

They Rule

They Rule


Larger view.

They Rule is a launchpad for investigating corporate power relationships in the United States. The website allows users to browse through a variety of maps that function as directories to companies such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft. They Rule depicts the connections between companies through diagrams of their power structures, specifically their boards of directors. (from the Whitney site)

This is Josh On’s “They Rule” site currently featured at the Whitney Museum in New York. I’ve been discussing this work with josh over the years and I think it is a really important site. I think it reveals firstly the corporate power relationships, the power of sociometry, and most of all the power of the net in being able to mediate global networks of this kind. How else could this sociometric exploration be used? How could it reveal and organise and network the power of the opposition to the rulers? Great that it is recognised by the art world. It is truly art in the service of… (see earlier post with Hillman interview.)

Go Josh!

Posted on

77353200

gordon.coale weblog

I do a live music webcast, called TestingTesting, from my living room. Our next show is June 3

And it is great! Now this is the future of music. Who else is doing this?

Posted on

77352593

Howard Rheingold’s Reboot talk
Howard is being blogged “live” on Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things.

Don’t think that money is never a motive force, but the Internet, the PC, and the Web weren’t motivated by money. There are 0.5MM blogs, but only three of them make any money, the rest are in it for reputation, love, to contribute to the commons.

Posted on

77331730

The Jung Lexicon

The Lexicon is reprinted here with the permission of the author, Daryl Sharp, of Toronto, Ontario. Daryl Sharp is a Jungian Analyst and the publisher of Inner City Books.

Posted on

Art, the Net, the collective unconscious

Shakespeare’s Royal Self

by James Kirsch, M.D.

The root of all neurosis is the refusal to accept conflict consciously; once an unconscious conflict becomes conscious, it is no longer neurotic and neurotic suffering is replaced by authentic suffering, which brings about the healing of neurosis

This is by Ediger – found it in my old EditThisPage Weblog File (will post that up soon.) I like the quote and did a search for it, but only found my original post. PLUS other nice stuff.

Particularly the item linked here by James Kirsch. The cgjungpage is such a great resource! What struck me most was the quote from Jung. I am relating this to my earlier posts re Hillman and also to the nature of the NET.

The Net is an expression of the collective unconscious – like all great art. That is a BIG idea.

Art, by its very nature, is not science, and science is essentially not art, both provinces of the mind, therefore, have a reservation that is peculiar to them, and that can be explained only from themselves. Hence when we speak of the relation between psychology and art, we are treating only of that aspect of art which without encroachment can be submitted to a psychological manner of approach. Whatever psychology is able to determine about art will be confined to the psychological process of artistic activity, and will have nothing whatever to do with the innermost nature of art itself.

What contribution can analytical psychology make to the root problem of artistic ‘creation,’ that is, the mystery of the creative energy? . . . Inasmuch as ‘no created mind can penetrate the inner soul of Nature,’ you will surely not expect the impossible from our psychology, namely a valid explanation of that great mystery of life, that we immediately feel in the creative impulse. Like every other science psychology has only a modest contribution to make towards the better and deeper understanding of the phenomena of life, it is no nearer than its sisters to absolute knowledge.

C. G. JUNG

Posted on

Ritual, virtual, sacred space

Ancient Strategies in Contemporary Art by Deni DeBon ©

Dominique Mazeaud began a project called “The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande,” in 1987. Once a month, on the same day each month, like clockwork she went to the Rio Grande river, near her home, and removed garbage out of the river. Part of her work involved keeping a diary. Sometimes the diary was documentation of the day’s events and other times she wrote “prayers” or poems about her ritual.12 Though Mazeaud is not making a grand ecological impact, her art reaches out through compassion, for one day a month she coexists with the river. Her ritual is personal and usually involves herself, and the people who pass by. Personal rituals work to reclaim one’s own identity, which cannot be found in today’s industrial culture. There is a longing to obtain an intrinsic sense of identity within the individual. Artists are turning to interactive processes which often seem simple and down to earth, working towards finding a sense of function within the world which also heightens the sense of self. Within the current traditions, there is little understanding of ritual art forms. In Mazeaud’s piece, her diary is the only commodity available. The function of the work is the interaction between artist and subject, the ending result is only known to the artist

I am adding this as it follows up on the Suzi Gablik item below. There are some important elements here.

Ritual
prayers
diary

These are the things that move us into the virtual, and that is where the gods are.

Virtual and ritual – connected?

Posted on

Blog

Three plus top box

Whee! I have just updated the whole of the template for the blog! Simple look – white like it has been for a while but this time with a CSS – Cascading Style Sheet – which I will be able to use for all my three column layouts now.

The link above is to the info I used to learn the layout.

Posted on

Promising Linux development? No.

ZDNet |UK| – News – Story – Linux vendors move to standard platform

Four Linux distributors – Caldera, SuSE, Turbolinux and Conectiva – are to back a standard software distribution, as a way of encouraging application development and battling the dominant position of Red Hat

This is an exciting development! I have Mandrake on my machine and so I can now read this stuff and at least have some grasp – none of it easy without a background in IT etc. Just downloaded & printed the white paper off the http://www.unitedlinux.com site. The implications of that will be interesting.

The thing is that once the UnitedLinux is there it is still free. Red Hat, anyone can use it. It takes a bit of getting your head around!

Update Monday, 3, June

RMS has called for people not to support it. It is driven by the Ransom Love who is not pro free software. They will not be distributing the binaries on their CDs. Selling the trademark is the business model. What seemed promising now does not.

Proudly powered by WordPress