BIO
Curt Cloninger is an artist, writer, and Associate Professor of New Media at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His art undermines language as a system of meaning in order to reveal it as an embodied force in the world. His art work has been featured in the New York Times and at festivals and galleries from Korea to Brazil. Exhibition venues include Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Granoff Center for The Creative Arts (Brown University), Digital Art Museum [DAM] (Berlin), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Chicago), Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and the internet. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including commissions for the creation of new artwork from the National Endowment for the Arts (via Turbulence.org) and Austin Peay State University's Terminal Award.
Cloninger has written on a wide range of topics, including new media and internet art, installation and performance art, experimental graphic design, popular music, network culture, and continental philosophy. His articles have appeared in Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, and on ABC World News. He is also the author of eight books, most recently One Per Year (Link Editions). He maintains lab404.com, playdamage.org , and deepyoung.org in hopes of facilitating a more lively remote dialogue with the Sundry Contagions of Wonder.
Cloninger has written on a wide range of topics, including new media and internet art, installation and performance art, experimental graphic design, popular music, network culture, and continental philosophy. His articles have appeared in Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, and on ABC World News. He is also the author of eight books, most recently One Per Year (Link Editions). He maintains lab404.com, playdamage.org , and deepyoung.org in hopes of facilitating a more lively remote dialogue with the Sundry Contagions of Wonder.
On Being - new thread
Hi Pall,
The direction in which you are proceeding tells something about your conception of being. The program discovers the network before it discovers its own hardware. It still seems very much stuck in disembodied software space. To come aware that you are a running process on an operating system is still very hermetic and metaphysical, and perhaps totally unrelated to Heideggerean "being in the world." Is there a way for the program to come aware of the hardware on which it is running? I think about the '50s MIT hackers who were aware of how many revolutions the actual physical disc was spinning and would save lines of code in their programs by taking advantage of this awareness.
I also remember cracking via telnet back in the day. You'd always check to see what processes were running in order to make sure that the sysadmin wasn't checking to see what processes were running. If I recall correctly, your peek at the processes would show if he was peeking at the processes, but it would never show your own peek at the processes. He could see you peeking, and you could see him peeking, but you could never see yourself peeking. Again, it seems related to the difference between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. Once you peek at your own being, you shift from ready-to-hand functioning to present-at-hand analyzing, and your ready-at-handed being temporarily disappears to you.
Best,
Curt
The direction in which you are proceeding tells something about your conception of being. The program discovers the network before it discovers its own hardware. It still seems very much stuck in disembodied software space. To come aware that you are a running process on an operating system is still very hermetic and metaphysical, and perhaps totally unrelated to Heideggerean "being in the world." Is there a way for the program to come aware of the hardware on which it is running? I think about the '50s MIT hackers who were aware of how many revolutions the actual physical disc was spinning and would save lines of code in their programs by taking advantage of this awareness.
I also remember cracking via telnet back in the day. You'd always check to see what processes were running in order to make sure that the sysadmin wasn't checking to see what processes were running. If I recall correctly, your peek at the processes would show if he was peeking at the processes, but it would never show your own peek at the processes. He could see you peeking, and you could see him peeking, but you could never see yourself peeking. Again, it seems related to the difference between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. Once you peek at your own being, you shift from ready-to-hand functioning to present-at-hand analyzing, and your ready-at-handed being temporarily disappears to you.
Best,
Curt