<eyebeam><blast> Only questions

[Eve Andree Laramee <wander@earthlink.net>]

ONLY QUESTIONS
March 2 - March 9, 1998
107 new questions asked
502 total questions asked in 36 days


395. Why the 'fascination' with the US?
396. Why?
397. " O que jaz no abismo sob o mar que se ergue?
398. What lies in the abyss under the sea that grows?
399. Can we think nationality out of traditional categories?
400. Can we think nationality in a globalized world?
401. Can what is proper fortifies without bringing back its conservative
sublimated memory?
402. So what does this have to do with the internet ?
403. How, after all, could astrological causation operate, if it were
impossible to coordinate the time of a sublunar event, such as one's
birth, with the temporal events in interstellar space?
404. How could a plausible horoscope be written that took into account
the radically divergent, multiple temporalities of stars whose light
came from vastly different distances from the earth?
405. How do these ruminations on the temporally delayed implications of
the discovery of the speed of light help us to understand the second
theme suggested by our title, the meaning of the new technologies of
virtual reality, or more ambitiously, the purely simulacral world of
which they are sometimes taken to be emblematic?
406. Can we simply extrapolatefrom the lessons of interstallar space to
the implications of cyberspace?
407. Haven't we, in fact, argued that the telescope, for all its
disruption of notions of visual presence and immediacy, nonetheless
resists reduction to an apparatus of pure simulacral construction, a
model of total visual semiosis without an original object behind it?
408. isn't virtual reality normally understood as precisely such a
reduction, producing a hyperreality that has no referential origin? 
409. And isn't that hyperreality often assumed to be rooted in the
accelerated temporality, even simultaneity, of a cyberspace in which
distances no longer matter?
410. Would this not also be the case for a reality in which the image of
a thing still appears, but is no longer there?"
411. is not the light reflecting off us, radiating our images to any
eyes open to receive them, somehow destined, even if in increasingly
diffused form, to travel forever, making our present the past of
innumerable futures still to come?
412. is it "scientistic"?
413. By this I assume you mean, do I think that because some scientific
researchers are arguing for a distributed cognition model as the basis
for human cognition, do I necessarily think they are correct?
414. Are such ideas teleological?
415. Is this desire?
416. Does it involve possible majorities?
417. Non.identification -- isn't this a intelectual concept?
418. Why is still illiteracy so high?
419. But why have Brazialns to justivy themselves for that?
420. What you call nationalistic is cultural -- where else "cultura" and
"sociedade" is not seen seperately?
421. Why it puzzles you?
422. Sorry, but what kind of possible relation do you have in mind
between favelas and globalization?
423. How would you relate the discussion above with your experience
between Argentina and USA?
424. Does this have anything to do with Freud and oral regression?
425. In a "recombinant" art work, what pleasures will reward the reader
for what may be random and low-correlation connections?
426. Does randomness have pleasures of its own?
427. Why, he asks, does he subvocalize as well as dial the numbers?
428. What might a 'history of light' entail?
429. Would technology be the mode of processing, producing, and
circulating
spatial and temporal relationships that have long since been detached
from
anything astronomical?
430. Is it even the same light at all, this light that hits us through
the
cathode ray tube?
431. (Hello, question archivist -- Who are you?)
432. As a reader/viewer/participant, how does knowledge of an artwork's
production affect your experience? If it were conclusively proved that
Nabokov wrote "Lolita" using the I-Ching, would that alter your
perception
of the text?
433. Why is randomness in hypermedia (particularly hypertext) so often
seen
as a sign of artistic laziness?
434. Is labor-value (the amount of work the artist put into it) really
more
important than use-value (what the participant gets from the
experience)?
435. Why is it that HT fiction can provoke this type of confusion within
a
reader?
436. Is it just this lack of an atypical narrative structure
[disemboweling the narrative has such a nice ring to it] &/or the actual
structural/physical/mechanical differences encountered within the text
itself [hyperlinks etc]?
437. That is, if a reader/viewer/inter-actor expects to
have invisibly crafted cues/clues/concept arrows concretely
embedded/foregrounded in the fiction itself in order to enhance meaning
or
signification, why bother trying to grapple with new types of
fiction/function?
438. ["but what does it MEAN?"]
439. Whatever happened to the notion of reader/viewer actually
participating in/cogitating upon a work, and making an overt effort in
order to glean something from it?
440. is this "posthuman" any different than the human inscribing itself?
441. Where are we going that we must rush to a so-called posthuman
condition?
442. Where are they?
443. My problem is more about how to think their open conception of
nationality today?
444. what came bak off your piece was a combination of:1. your initial
reactionary comment on talvin singh's work (with a tinge of anger of
your
own ?)
445. But is it sound to accept that detachment as part of our
ideology rather_ then simply a nuance of our communication?
446. Has anyone polled the citizens of a dying third world nation on
their
feelings towards greater bandwidth?
447. Whyat GIS are you attempting to comprehend?
448. Didn't his (Yves Fissault's) theories of determinism and
stochasticity in complex dynamical systems derive from his studies of
ant
colonies?
449. (I know this is a little off the subject, but it's pretty
facinating, no?)
450. Do you know about percolation theory?
451. He was also making these films about ants.... Do you have any
recollection?
452. What happens when we group together a multitude of different people
under the guise of lack?
453. What/Who does this homogenization of local and global tactics into
a
simple dialogue of access/lack benefit?
454. For whom?
455. What makes the power structure of that public sphere which
you think is surfacing in the wake of transnational corporations any
better from those local spheres within which people are already
embroiled?
456. The players become larger, the stakes higher, the control
moved away from your immediate situation?
457. What makes you call the internet an arena of democratic exchange?
458. What specifically about it is democratic?  Who is making the
decisions
behind it's policies, who is setting the parameters for participation
within this arena?
459. Am I mistaken in that assumption, and if so, how?
On the other hand, does anyone else shiver at the notion of artworks,
hypertexts and so on being calculated to provide the perfect 20 percent
repetitiveness?
460. Or perhaps it is power?
461. is ths net art, no, yes, maybe?
462. Isn't the Net about communication?
463. The question is: are these positions mutually exclusive or can we
combine 1. and 2. as parts of the same "guerrilla" (life, art,
existence...)?
464. Are both figures adequate for a "model" of artistic action as
intervention inside/outside a culture?
465. Is there a certain topology where center and margins interchange
continuously, so in one moment the subject locates
him/herself as center and in other moment as margin, membrane?
466. (For the end of god's judgement. is that the translation?)
467. at a certain point artaud was asked what is cruelty?
468. 'What are poets for in a destitute time?'
469. Isn't National Identity as an open process only a regulative idea?
470. is it interesting and desirable to live without it? is a global
identity possible?
471. is global against national?
472. and NOW?
473. why?
474. what is it that makes one the One and the next
475. the Other?
476. why would anyone willy-nilly grant preeminence to a software
writer in seattle over one in tokyo other than the fact that one has
been designated the Other in real-space discourses and therefore, quite
uncritically and dangerously, we condemn her to perpetual Otherness
irrespective of her significance in, and contributions to, the creation
of
these media?
477. How can you even contemplate another post given how far behind you
are
on your other projects?
478.When's lunch?
479. Is it really true that the mind automatically channels
contradictory
viewpoints into a "continuous, uninterrupted thought"?
480. Seen?
481. Death?
482. Seen More deaths?
483. More Melted bodies?
484. Seen death?
485. Seen bombs?
486. Seen bodies mutilated?
487. What democracy and for who?
488. How does the 'web' feel about death?
489. And bombs and gas masks?
490. Where to?
491. Oh men and womenWhere to?
492. (where was it or is going to be published?)
493. Or is it possible that even the simplest, most taken for granted,
most
universally produced, piece of technology, when incorporated into some
aspect of a particular culture, so expresses that culture that we can
read
through it the realtive position of that culture in the global economy?
494. Does poor people's housing always look alike?
495. Isn't that already a build in "otherness" in every single story ?
496. Isn't it interesting that in South America nationalisms in XX
century
have been so closely associated with militarism?
497. "The question, however, which remains to be answered is this: has
the
signifier 'America' without distinctions, without separation of the
South
from the North, any possible role to play as far as the Latin American
peoples are concerned?
498. Are quilombos still existing?
499. Are they adapted to Brazilian authority thinking or do they share
self-regulating mechanism?
500. What would be typical for such a place?
501. Who can now live entirely on coin and paper money?
502. Ever wonder what those Europeans are up to, trying to form a more
perfect union?


Forgive any ommissions, the analog-eyeball-bot's prosthesis crashed.
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