Experigraph

Both the empirical (empeiria: "experience") and the aesthetic (aisthese/aisthanomai: "to feel/sense") are derived from sensation and/or experience (both etymologically/historically and in their current general uses). No definition can consistently draw a dividing line between them. Of the many attempts that have been made, from CP Snow to Aristotle, the line differs and what is included and discluded is not consistent: arbitrarity forms the basis of the distinction. However, as with all arbitrary decisions, their freedom give place to the possibility of a utilitarian definition, which frees a categorical distinction into one based on use (without any necessary logical grounding). The arbitrary distinction here proposed is one of practicality and impracticality (that is, of no specific practical use that can be articulated as such), for "science" and "art" respectively. These distinctions, like any others, cannot be held up, yet their action-orien...

The Greek empeiria translates generally to the Latin experientia which then relates to our word experience. The question arises that, if our epistemology is ostensibly "empiricist", just what sort of experience are we talking about? Are we talking about any experience at all, or is there is a difference between different kinds of experiences, and perhaps crucially, are there experiences which we must bracket out, which cannot count as grounds for empirical knowledge. Without articulating the idea in so many words, past forms of empiricism have the tendency to leave out large terrains of experience in favour of experiences which - paradoxically - are more easily rationalizable. The pretended opposition of empiricism and rationalism collapses together in the face of what could simply be termed experiences that are too intense for both their tendencies. Laboratory observation and having sex are both experiences, the latter can be said to be more intense. However in the forme...

2006 TIME magazine Person of The Year – "You": Lev Grossman: "It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes." In 2006, Time magazine chose the millions of anonymous contributors of user-generated content to Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Second Life, the Linux operating system, and the multitudes of other websites featuring user contribution as its Person of the Year. The choice was personified simply as You. The capital Y is fitting as this is an abstract you (it doesn't refer to any one "you" in particular). By not referring to a particularity, it isn't required to refer to anyone: whe...

The aesthetic use of a technology - the theatrical use - explores a technology in its abductive capacities - it reels through the experimental aspects of coexistence between the agent and the technical object. The use of written language then - already subject to these precepts - spreads to the different medial forms integrated into the web, and is there challenged in its reception (on the part of the artist-creator as well as the speculative reader-viewer). In this assumed immersion, the entirely virtual is presented as web aesthetics, which favour certain concepts in use, from which is selected the idea of the neo-oral. In arbitrarily isolating letters from pictures (letters are pictures, quite simply), the discussion will be on the assumed forms "literature" might take. Neo-orality, then, takes those "oral" aspects of what internet literature might be - or rather, we could state the affair as its coincidence with an oral form of "literature", instea...

The event not as a transcendental moment of maybe - but a moment of simultaneous violation and recreation. Agamben's Coming Community loses this as violation - the core narrative event is a breakthrough for some, a tragedy for others (As is the French Revolution's deprivation of those dependent and thriving in monarchy, or less able to compete in the republic that follows). Yet in the balance of privilege and exclusion, the pragmatic processes of a system tend towards one solution, whereas writing as a practice can form favouring another - writing inverts (at best) in symbols - whatever the event supposedly refers to, the more incognizant it is of what it could destroy the more impractical it is, or the more unpredictive it is in its practical application. Monism is found in the Nasadiya Sukta of the Rigveda, which speaks of the One being-non-being that 'breathed without breath'. shankara's absolute monism: It is part of the six Hindu systems of philosophy, based on...

the vitruvian man can actually be contained in any shape - to draw a circ Da Vinci's Corpse is a metaphor for the most extreme experimental confrontation - one that overturns all theory, virtual simulacrum and rationalization - it is pure information, informe, and totally underming in its presence. There is no simple, objective observation - there are observations which exist along a gradient, some more affective and informing than others. A non-affective idea like a mathematical truth is true in its own technical parameters but is ultimately severely removed from any experimental/affective system - the final picture with what we call "knowledge" is the interaction with a human subject - this sensual interaction is never objective, but rather has varying degrees of evocation. The more we over-rationalize and mediate experience, the more severe and affective experience has to be to undermine that over-arching theory. These are images of Kuhn's revolutionary science - a...

"Thus he [the shoemaker] noted that the dialectic, which is always the first stage in life, makes itself heard even here, however insignificantly it might seem, with that squeaking which has surely not escaped the profound research of some psychologist. Unity, on the other hand, only comes about later—and in this respect his boots were vastly superior to all others, which were usually destroyed in the dialectic—a unity which attained its highest form in the pair of boots which Charles XII wore during his famous ride." (Forord, Kierkegaard - English version taken from Pattison, "Kierkegaard and Genre" in Poetics Today) The Kierkegaardian individual, introduces something new The poioumenal cracks the dialectic - introduces the individual with something new, perhaps satirical, perhaps violating, the subject brings a new instance to the picture that is not contained in the organic process - in this case it is a shoemaker - superficiality disarms the profound, in this ca...