I would like to talk about all [or some, bracketed, parts] of this tomorrow during the live show at 11 am MDT.
I hesitate to speak of us as “users” of this platform because I’m not clear what it means to be a “user”—it seems to be a bad or a limited thing, actually, to merely use without contributing or participating. It reduces the platform/interface to tool (purely instrumental) which I don’t think it is; at least not in the way that a hammer or even a “smartphone” is a manipulable object.
I would see the platform (please don’t cringe!) as something more like a…placenta. The unspoken “with.”
(For those not reading Sloterdijk, here is what I’m referring to…not the blob part, but the philosophical text:)
The placental platform should facilitate the exchanges of meaning we wish to have, refining as much signal from noise as possible, so we can focus on significance.
I would rather model ourselves as participants than as users. The platform should facilitate our participation in every way that’s most fulfilling and operationally smooth. We mostly shouldn’t notice it, just like the fetus doesn’t notice the placenta, and yet it’s there…with…facilitating, filtering, exchanging, refining.
I have some concrete ideas about how this could be done at a “participant interface” level, and I think we can begin (and have already begun) to model how “participant interactions” can be amplified, clarified, and enhanced.
I would encourage us to think across media as well. What are the flows between text, visual, audio? And what are the temporal (including synchronous and asynchronous) dimensions? How do we move between the intensity and heat of “live in real time” to the spaciousness and coolness of reflection and review, and vice versa?
To use Albert Murray’s formulation, how do these conversations “extend, elaborate, and refine” our intuitions? And what forms do these extensions, elaborations, and refinements take?
I see these Infinite Conversations ultimately serving as milieu for other types of productions. As a writer, poet, and media artist, in the end I want to create pieces that transcend my immediate (mediated) context to speak on wider and/or more intimate scales. These productions can then generate further conversations (enriching the milieu) which spur greater artistic creations, and so on…
If anyone would like discuss live, I’ll be on the Zoom line on Tuesday 7/11 at 11 am MDT!
(time zone conversion)