Dirk Vekemans
Since 2005
Works in Kessel-Lo Belgium

ARTBASE (1)
PORTFOLIO (1)
BIO
born in 1962 in Lier, Belgium.
studied filology at Louvain, Belgium.

worked a lot in bars and restaurants before i became obsessivly addicted to producing stuff on computers.

i once won a design contest of cgi-magazine and they let me go to New York for four days, that was nice.

i think in terms of writing mostly (or programming, but those are very similar processes for me)

painting is a very different process and i'm very bad at it but i do it anyway because i like the differences it produces and i like the freshness of amateurism, i guess.

what i produce new media-wise is also very much influenced by my daily practice of webdesign and programming with its concerns of usability and the pragmatic approach it implies.

Discussions (292) Opportunities (0) Events (1) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

MU #3, including an experience of innocence


MU # 3
a Flash animation (214 kb) and 63 copies

&

The Mu Incident, an experience of innocence
(part of the Anke Veld novel - English only)

http://www.vilt.net/nkdee/reading.jsp

greetings,
dv @ Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee

DISCUSSION

Mu #2


Mu #2 - the Time Machine.
Cinema 4DXL, ImageReady, Flash, 2mb
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee/mu2.jsp

greetings,
dv @ Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee

DISCUSSION

Re: Dyson at Google + Cathedral down due to author's negligence


> Time machines, creating time, is that what you meant?

When we create stuff, we are (usually) less aware of the time machine
dimension of the work than when we see it a few years later. Then the time
machine is sometimes a portal back to the time it was created. Sometimes it
is a portal to the future. Sometimes it has multiple temporal locations.
Sometimes the machine doesn't work anymore...

But yes, it could also mean 'creating time', as you say. And other things.

I am doing a project involving some older digital poetry (from the eighties)
and the time machine is quite prominent there.

ja
http://vispo.com

The difference with traditional writing here being that each work is
essentially part of it's timeframe due to the techniques/software-hardware
being used in creating it? Making its timeframe more general-less personal
than is the case with an ordinary poem? Using Director 6.0 frames it in a
different time than using Director 8.5? The problematic part being that we
are not aware of how much of the current state-of-the-art in computing goes
into creating these pieces of digital writing, while with ordinary writing
we needn't bother?

I don't get the portal to the future bit, though. Digital writing going
metaphorical by pretending what it could be if current techniques evolved
beyond their present state, showing directions for the future perhaps? Or
when talking concrete poetry creating virtualities for future
'materialisations'?

In traditional, structuralist narrative theory you got the distinction
narration time/narrated time. A theory that is more towards reception of the
literary work adds 'reading time' to those time dimensions, as a required
condition for the existence of the other two. Those theories generally lead
to a historic, procedural interpretation of a text, making for a different
Shakespeare sonnet depending on when one reads it.

A piece of digital writing would add runtime to that, effectively including
the hardware into its timeframe and expanding the reading experience beyond
the visual at the cost of binding it to the hardware it was written for. I
see you taking a turn for the positive here, claiming a magical HG Wells
quality for digital writing because of its fragility. Runtime as a future
actualisation of creation time, making a sort of handler for a reverse
engeneering process to get back there. Restoring the place, as it were.

In my Cathedral i start from places, because in spite of some very
convincing believers in the discrete universe, i maintain the time-place
continuum in its Leibnizian sense. Consequently there's a fifth time-place
dimension there, namely global network time. Without referring to the Dyson
book (i haven't read it) or the man himself, that's where the dysonian
horseshit kicks in. I think you're right in being very sceptical towards
such thinking (its crappy because it mixes up the fictional timeframes with
realtime), but perhaps you're underestimating Mrs Hayles argument on this:
in a world with a science of simulation, companies act on the power of their
own make-believe. Which brings us back to some very real dangers on the
print-to-digital market.

dv@ Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee

DISCUSSION

Re: Dyson at Google + Cathedral down due to author's negligence


> So, yes, they are not about making all information accessible for free.
> They are about making as much information accessible as is necessary to turn
> a profit.

I'm sure they'll capitalise on anything they can, but if you look at the percentage of what they're scanning that's still for sale, you can hardly imagine that is the only reason for undertaking the enormous task.

> I share your concerns about Google as monolith moogle.
>
> The Dyson writing does not sound like something from an independent
> intellectual. Very techno-lyrical singing the google tune, isn't it?
>
i had a quick look around. The guy just has a lyrical temperament, i guess. No immediate evidence of googlish paycheques. Wrote a book on what he suggests here: the emergence of the web as a global sentient being. The 'visit' and consequent article may be a very sentient Google initiative, though. To quote a Canadian quoting Ginsburg:
" I've seen the best minds of my generation zoned out on Windows
gone Microsoft in the head and lost like cattle
in the perimeters of happiness without a clue
as to the way back home;"
a Nice rant (http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/choyce/poem6.htm) that turned up by googling the Ginsburg line as i remembered it

> The notion that we're going to build machines that are going to solve our
> problems for us is horseshit. Just like in our own lives we have to solve
> our own problems. No one/nothing is going to do it for us.
>
yeah, like not forgetting to renew your DNS registration when you're in the business of making net art: my Cathedral & the whole of www.vilt.net will be down for some more hours. Rarify this mail, tell everyone, call CNN, mail the universe: it will be back, it will be back!

the world goes down the drain and all we care about is our petty little toys. And yet that feels like a moral obligation, too.

Time machines, creating time, is that what you meant?

jeez, i feel amputated knowing the thing is offline. Where's the cyber-schrink?

gnoumph,
dv
> ja
> http://vispo.com
>

DISCUSSION

Re: Dyson at Google


But the implication in the article you cite is much more grand than that. Is
this latter day dot commery (high bluster) or is there something more to it?

ja?

It's hard to tell. I do think the author is referring to 'strong' AI here,
an intelligence that, if any comparison makes sense, supersedes the human
intelligence. To my knowledge Google has not made public anything on trying
to built a globally distributed artificial intelligence, but this can easily
be seen as simply forgetting to mention the fact that everything they are
doing is best defined by those 4 words. If not officially claimed , the
thought seems to be very much alive amongst people who work there.
Personally i guess it's a natural evolution, a becoming of global
intelligence that has been long in the making and our words are just drawing
humanly artificial boundaries that never get really crossed. Google is doing
its part, providing what the market demands: a workable authoritive semantic
ontology based the best of human knowledge. Basically their method is genial
in its simplicity: do not define, let the search define the answer. Ofcourse
the actual enabling of the system involves high complexity and massive data
accumulation.

So is there something more to it? Based on those assumptions, there must be,
what else could be the economic neccessity of doing all that hard, expensive
work? I don't think they think one minute about cashing in on book contents
or fringing in on author's rights. Google does not want possession of what's
in the books, they want us to search them using Google, record, use, profile
those searches to improve the quality of the oracle itself. Quality searches
is the restraint needed to find the right automata, Wolfram would say,
perhaps. Just like they are not interested in our private information when
they recently invaded the desktop search market. They don't care what Jim
Andrews stores on 'beauty' at home, they need to know how _a_ jim andrews
got the notion of beauty before he turned to Google ( although Google
stresses the fact they do not transmit information to the Google servers
through the use of Google Desktop, they do admit somewhere deeper in the
notes on privacy that information can be transmitted when you first use
google locally and then globally or vica versa- i only have that from the
Dutch pages at
<http://desktop.google.nl/support/bin/answer.py?answer148>
http://desktop.google.nl/support/bin/answer.py?answer148 )

Otherwise, sticking to the facts, at least there's more to think about:
- Google is undoubtedly engaged in an attempt to gain control over (the
access to) a critical mass of all that is ever written on earth. In fact
it's not an attempt, they're doing it, no one else has the economic power +
technology to do it and most major libraries/universities are happy to have
it done by Google. Here's a story in Mit's Technology review with accurate
information, i think:
<http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_library.asp>
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_library.asp

- Google is a commercial company. it may be a company run by Extremely Nice
People, wanting to do Extremely Nice Things for Humanity but it's a company.
I've always found it strange that people make such a fuzz over Microsoft and
no one complains about Google (or the Macromedia-Adobe monster for that
matter): they're all companies doing what companies do as far as our
jurisdiction allows (and beyond untill they have to pay too much).
While it might be hard these days to distinguish some of our universities or
other scholarly institutions from the commercial machines they are running
on, still it's quite a change when access to the written word will be
decided on blunt commercial terms. Somehow, i do not like the idea of one
company sitting on top of our top quality information, no matter how Nice it
seems.Some doomsday scenario's immediately spring to mind, deliberate
obfuscation of sensitive knowledge has always been the privilege of those
endowed with the Power over Books. Therefore i think the importance of the
outstanding source of independent knowledge that is available to us now,
Wikipedia, cannot be stressed too much. It is there that we as (virtual)
individuals living together can still act instead of being acted upon.

- through its omnipresence, its dominance, Google already is an intellectual
authority. I would define an intellectual authority here as an institute the
individual turns to when seeking to consolidate its information as
acceptable, workable knowledge. I was discussing the correct spelling of a
Dutch word today with my sister who has a masters degree in our language,
who's acclaimed poetry is being published. As an author and teacher her
first suggestion was to Google it. Just an example, but it shows how quickly
these changes occur and as Google increases the AI currants in their
web-services we''ll be turning for authoritive answers to them on more
important matters.Good, bad or plain ugly, we're living it.

dv
_____

Van: owner-list@rhizome.org [mailto:owner-list@rhizome.org] Namens Jim
Andrews
Verzonden: donderdag 3 november 2005 15:24
Aan: list@rhizome.org
Onderwerp: RE: RHIZOME_RAW: Dyson at Google

I gather that the idea of scanning all those books is to be able to return
search results that allow people to read a paragraph or two from the source,
not have access to the whole book. And spiders or AI will read the books and
index them much like they do with Web content. So, in that sense, yes, they
are scanning all those books to be read by an AI.

But the implication in the article you cite is much more grand than that. Is
this latter day dot commery (high bluster) or is there something more to it?

ja?

"My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt
I was entering a 14th-century cathedral - not in the 14th century but in the
12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone
here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting
everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence
in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,"
explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by
an AI."

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dyson05/dyson05_index.html