There is a good reason for this, besides the fact that money is always lacking. Time and talent are demanding; they require management. Give me money, and all I need say is: Thanks, I really am very grateful.

But then I reflected that for many of us time is our treasure, or talent is our treasure. Take my wife (please). Mary has a talent for writing and telling stories, and she spends a lot of time doing both. That talent and time is a treasure that she gives to the world and today to you in this church. So, for many of us, time, talent, and treasure are not three separate things but three related things—three things that may support each other, like a triangle, which is a symbol of the Trinity. Treasure is not just silver and gold—or in our day paper and plastic. Treasure is what you have brought here today for us to enjoy.

Then I reflected on something Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: “Where your treasure is there will your heart be also.” Commonly, the interpretation is: Take care what you work for: you might get it, or even become it. If you accumulate earthly things, don’t expect to fly up to heaven with them: there is a weight limit—no suitcases, no carry-ons—just come as you are. Don’t count on entering the kingdom of heaven with a camel. But if you accumulate heavenly things—that is to say, acts of love—you can expect them to be waiting for you when you arrive.

This is a true interpretation, but I want to turn what Jesus said around and say: Where your heart is, there your treasure may also be.

That is to say: what you love doing may be the very thing that is your treasure. This treasure you can give to God, by doing it well, and by doing it for others. If you love to cook, that is one of your treasures. If you love to sing, that is one of your treasures. If you love children, that is one of your treasures.

The love—the treasure—may require discovery—or even hunting. When children watch commercials, they often say: “I need that!” What they mean is: “I want that!” What they don’t mean is: “I love that!”

It may be that your treasure

That is to say: what you love doing may be the very thing that is your treasure. This treasure you can give to God, by doing it well, and by doing it for others. If you love to cook, that is one of your treasures. If you love to sing, that is one of your treasures. If you love children, that is one of your treasures.

The love—the treasure—may require discovery—or even hunting. When children watch commercials, they often say: “I need that!” What they mean is: “I want that!” What they don’t mean is: “I love that!”

It may be that your treasure is missing. For example, if you are lonely, it may be that you will find your treasure in helping others.

Some will tell you that treasure comes from God, and in sharing it, you are merely returning what you have received. That is true. But I find it upsetting, since God has given so much, and I have returned so little. So let’s not talk about that.

This is the only radical thing I have to say: When asked for time, talent, and treasure, try to determine what your real treasure is, and go from there.

A few of you might feel cheated if I don’t talk about money and the Church. I don’t know if what I have to say will lead you to give more or less money to the Church.

First, I have a word for those of you whose treasure is the time and talent to make a lot of money. The word is not Jesus’ word to the rich young man (though fortunate is the person who follows Jesus’ word), but this: you will be happier if you give more of it away.

What about the rest of us, who don’t have a lot of money, or even don’t have enough money? I look at giving money to the Church as a discipline, or a prayer, like fasting. You don’t have to like it, but you have to do it. You are not giving your treasure (I am not talking to the well-off) but an offering, an oblation, that is to say, a sacrifice. And like all disciplines, it should be done regularly, and you should feel it a little.

With this I have given my widow’s mite of thought about the three T’s. To sum up:

1. Look on time, talent, and treasure as possibly related and not separate gifts.

2. Regard giving money to the Church as a prayer—do it regularly and attentively.

Hear it.

Always an average value may be out of form indeed you can taste an efficient seamless fruit. Some of ur entities may not result in outsourcing. Astrology plays a vital role in human life. Fortune may favours you sometimes but not all d time.Even a day has both sun rise and sen set. If you don’t enjoy the taste of troubles in your life undoubtedly you can be a creator. I am not ruling my views against astrology but try to understand the cream of your purpose.

“When your time is good, your mistakes are taken as joke, But when your time is bad, even your jokes are noticed as mistakes” Did ur fortune will favours u here?????

No one can change your life except for you …nyone step all over you …Just openyour heart and your mind …mebody’s gonna make you want to …Until then baby are you going to let them …Hold you down and make you cry …Don’t you know? …Don’t youknow things can change …Things’ll go your way …If you hold on for one more day …Can you hold on for one more day .You could sustain or are you comfortable with this.You’ve got no one to blame for your unhappiness .You got yourself into your own mess .Lettin’ your worries passyou by. Don’t you think it’s worth your time .To change your mind? mebody’s gonna make you want to .Hold you down and make you cry .Don’t you know things can change …Things’ll goyour way …If you hold on for one more day …Can you hold on for one more day …Things’ll go your way …Hold on for one more day …But you hold on for one more day and …But you hold on for one more day and you …mebody’s gonna make you want to …Until then baby are you going to let them …Hold you down and make you cry …Don’tyou know? …Don’t you know things can change …Things’ll go your way …If you hold on for onemore day …Can’t you change it this time …Make up your mind…

Social media affords new forms of interactivity. Don’t get me started on ways in which theorists have attempted to point out the limited nature of how the word “interactivity”

There is, however, no reason to coin a new term–such as ergodic–to distinguish between the interactivity of traditional, non-digital works such as painting and literature with the interactivity that exists in digital media. Interactivity exists on a continuum–open and closed. It exists in all things to varying degrees. A stone’s interactivity (closer to the closed end of the continuum) affords more prediction in its feedback. I kick it, it provides a degree of feedback (it hurts me, it moves, etc.). Likewise, a person affords a more open interactivity. I kick a person, I’m unable to accurately predict the feedback they’ll provide. (I believe I lifted this example of open and closed from Meadow’s great book Pause and Effect).

A picture, like the one attached, illustrates how traditional works invite interaction (we actively interpret the image as breaking the fourth wall and interacting with “our world” rather than the world of the work, we attribute to it action, intention, purpose–we interact with it). The subject matter also illustrates the increased affordances of social media–the technology invites our creation, review, and commentary on our own and others’ work.   To me, it’s like value in color. The amount of white changes the value, but the white is still the same.  So to with interactivity.

Mainly, I wrote this post because I wanted an opportunity to post this picture. I like it–and the genre from which is  trompe-l’œil, or “trick of the eye.” If I could speak french, I’d say Trompe-l’œil a lot more as well.

Trompe-l’œil.

2. Can we think of Talan Memmott’s Lexia/Perplexia (his discursive use of the I-terminal as representing the cyborgian self against the self-as-Other) and then his Self-Portrait as tearing asunder the classical notion of the rootbook where the arbitrary law is set by the taproot and to instead cede into seeing the book as the fascicular root. How would the strata differ between the root-book and the book of radicle root?

3. Taken from the Social-Tesseracting Part 2 posting

“1. Dimensionality defines working concepts of reality.
2. Theoretically, dimensionality can also expand to define a spectrum of nascent social actions.
3. These particular social actions encompass communication trends defined by synthetic interactions.
4. Synthetic interactions create social froth that can be produced geophysically or geolocatively. Both connection types depend on relevant electronic gesturing:

5. This mix of synthetic interactions and electronic gesturing provokes a descriptive framework of this aggregated sodality. This framework is termed Social Tesseracting.
6. In order to adequately formulate Social Tesseracting, contemporary theorists need to extend “valid” reality definitions based currently on the endpoint of the geophysical.”

How would we see this social froth, electronic gesturing through remote tweeting and social cloud that are defined in a multiplicity of dimensionality against the contention that the existing linguistic models are not abstract enough and could not connect the language to the pragmatic and the semantic statements and the collective enunciation of the assemblage.

…they do not reach the abstract machine that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field. A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community. Language is, in Weinreich’s words, “an essentially heterogeneous reality.”‘ There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity. Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It forms a bulb. It evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch ofoil.* It is always possible to break a language.

down into internal structural elements, an undertaking not fundamentally
different from a search for roots.

4. What is the meaning of social-tesseracting in terms of a dimensionality that is always n-1 because “the multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available – always n – 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n – 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. ” What is the significance of this form of multiplicity of subtraction.  Is this because of the necessity of  “flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of dimensions”? Is this to ensure that the subjectivity of the nature of the social tesseract is marked and defined?

5. Should we think of the cut-ups and stir-fried narrative as a “principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignifying breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure. A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.” How is the passage below in the manifesto of Jim Andrew’s works:

It seems to me that there are a couple of things about the Web that naturally go with cut ups. The hyper link itself is wonderfully diverse in its associativity. The way that we end up going from text to text via hyper links makes for a cut up of sorts, cut ups not on the level of the word, as in Dali, or the chunk, as in Burroughs, but on a larger scale, link to link, text to text. The memory of surfing the Web, recalled later, is often of an intoxicating blur of diversely associative texts strung together by our own and the individual authors’ associativity via the provided links.

“…the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; mak[ing] it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of n dimensions and broken directions. Conjugate deterritorialized flows.”

6. If a rhizome is a map and not a tracing, is the map a cross-modal platform?  Would it be “…connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways.” Hence the social connectivity, communication mapping across different modality of speech and exchanges, form a large tangle of rhizomatic mapping of user-streams.  Can we talk about this mapping in terms of the the forms of memories in the social technologies we’ve read, as well as the social text that engages processes more than engagement with the end result, and then linking it to the unconscious. Moreover, it is stated that the map constructs the unconscious through the fostering of connections without fields and removal of the blockages of the bodies without organs. I argue that the last phrase may be an allusion to the removal of the blockage of suppressed memories in the psychoanalytic sense. It would be interesting to try to discuss this in relation to the kinds of neuroses, psychoses, schizophrenia and obsession that social technologies could breed. Also speak of our obsessive need to attain resolution of the cut-up and fragmented texts.

7. So how would we compare the ergodic aspects of Talan Memmott text with that of Jim Andrews and then the social technologies discussed in the Augmentology blog?

(First published on http://modularcriticism.blogspot.com/2009/09/reading-ergodic-literature-against.html)

Also, this is a poem I wrote 5 years ago that was published in Anthurium that I decided to revisit here as I think about the link between the psychological, psychosis, Lacan, Manovich’s database complex and media art in the moving talk by Jonathan Harrison (I daresay his visuals are made more poignant BECAUSE of the way he narrated their intentions rather than the actual visuals themselves)

glassy clear beads converge into aqua blue sea of white foam, splashing, ravishing mares enveloping inlets and inclines, bubbling, crystallizing into delicate skin of a naked nymph frolicking among waves leaping high as she metamorphosizes into a curvaceous snowy swan flying high to melt into the horizon where the sun transforms into an orange glob of heat, seizes H20s, and gathers clouds impregnated and producing cumuli which soon dissolves into liquid droplets that reverse precipitation to glassy clear beads splashed blue by Neptune, the fish, producing glassy blue beads that converge.

———————————–Begin text for blog entry below———————–

In reading through Aspet’s work on the meaning of Ergodic Literature, in light of the class discussions and blog posts (and I found David Gruber’s post on this very enlightening), I a now thinking as to what is it about media art that is poignant or ground-breaking compared to hand-crafted or even machine-crafted art (after all, art created with the help of machines and the skills of artisans, be they smiths, welders, machinists, furniture makers, builders etc, have been in existence, in different modes and forms according to existing tools (I refrain here from using the word technology, as it has been over-utilized in very unclear terms). One thing we do know about art, as Jonathan Harris himself would agree, is how it invokes our emotion. One need no sublime art to do that, even the cheesiest forms that hits at a raw nerve or emotional events that is within our recent history, would be enough to break the dam. But what is this new level of emotional access that we could and would like to do with Ergodic literature, a literature that seems able to break through the surface level to allow the audience to interact with the work at the making, or not? How is this different from the campsite fire game of spinning a yarn where each person seated in a circle would add a piece to the tale. Or even a book version where people used to add their own version of a tale that could have been started by anybody else, and continued by another anonymous writer.? Are we able to articulate the collective consciousness of the authors and readers in a manner more incisive as we begin to data-mine the mental models of these different contributors by deconstructing and then reconstructing the way in which their creative processes work by the way in which they choose use particular adjectives, verbs and leading cues?

While Aspeth’s arguments of the Ergodic model is dated in the sense that he seems unable to transcend the old computational model of unicoded ASCII mode of scriptons and textons, he provides a model that can be ripped apart and reconstructed if we now think in terms of a literature (across all textual platforms) whereby the scripton and texton can by turns be transformative to and away from each other. Wardrip-Fruin has provided a pretty good beginning to the re-articulation of Aarseth’s model when he parallels data and process, separating them only by a porous line to signify the artificial separation of the two just to aid our mind that has been schooled and trimmed in a manner not unlike the old-school literary critics that Aarseth had sharply criticized to grasp this layered model of reluctant categories. But more importantly, how can the ergodic model, with its traversal function that seemingly promise the reader/audience the freedom to traverse and trespass the rigid limitations that have been trained by their ids. I see in the traversal function the same form of traversal function that Lacan advocated in his model of the graph of desire

(borrowed from the Lacan and Monotheism:Psychoanalysis and the Traversal of Cultural Fantasy article because I was too lazy to draw my own), where the purpose of traversing the fantasy of the barred subject who is the split subject as the subject who tries to move from original signification to a new form of signification after imbibing the analytic discourse. The analysand crossing over. But in the crossing over, the split subject is able to form his/her own subjectivation by acknowledging the cause of the desire, the objet petit a. But at the point of traversal of phantasy (fantasy), there is something that drops up, which I will call the remainder. And it is this object that drops out that is my point of interest here. For likewise, in traversing the function that Aarspeth and Waldrip-Fruin talks about, there is always something that will escape the net of the model, or something that has to be sacrificed. I have not put my finger into what is being sacrificed, but perhaps in narrating the tale of that which is unnarratable in the conventional literary sense (but then, when one has read Lawrence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy, the very notion of a tale that violates Propp’s 31 functions of narrative elements is not a proper tale has long been dismissed). The protagonist is not human and will not being given humanistic qualities (which is another point of contention and problematics that I will not be tempted to discurse into here). Nor is it an animal or a being that is living and breathing in the cell-biology sense. It would be the narrative tale of a machine and in this tale, there would be many secret chambers, intentional and unintentional. And there would be the remainder. Will the remainder articulate itself organically in the tale, or do I have to find a way to work it in? I will be posting on this in my next post but for now, I want to go back into what it means to be ergodic.

I wrote this piece of poem at an age and time when I knew not what ergodic literature is. Nor did I know much then (except through a slight glance at the crude pomo generative text site
which only those uninformed in the inner logics and rationale of post-structuralist thought could have thought laughable) about how to think through the difference between a machine-generated text using Natural Language and a humanly structured text, where much thought and care is given into making the creation light and spontaneous, and to hide the layers of careful work that is put into creating that effect of sponataneity. The machine likewise is a result of carefully worded code, since to be careless is to invite syntax errors and logical inconsistencies that will result in a manifestation that is obviously ridiculous. Yet, it seems that we think of the software that is created to run the machine as an extension of the way in which the human thinks (and maybe in the way in which certain construction projects are done) ; a series of unfinished work (code) that is left hanging and merely covered over by other code, but always there and waiting to be accessed at some point by one who may be searching for it, or who may have stumbled upon it, a series of random texts that is the articulation of the connection between a score follower and computer-based speech recognition software. Or even texts that have been fed into a database that the code has been instructed to call up whenever certain strings or scripts are detected. As Wardrip-Fruin would say, the “central logic is planning.”This is what Talan Memmott did. Neologism takes on a different meaning, and the author becomes a virtual being, one that goes from mimesis to autopoesis to becoming one that mirrors the real (one that, as Lev Manovich says in his article “Database as a Symbolic Form” about unlimited database size which is the promise dream of the leading commercial database Oracle, parallelling the story by Borges about the map equal in size to the territory the world represents (and I struck by how resonating the stories written by a man who was blind at the peak of his creativity can resonate so well with what one would see in media art, does this speak of an inner eye, the ability to access the unconscious more strongly when one is able to block out the continuous interference from the outside.) Does the promise of infinite storage in the virtual landscape means that we can build a real-life holodeck of all memories and fantasies, with all our thrill at discovering the unexpected and unanticipated that seems to have organically sprung out from the genetic algorithm we have spun? Perhaps this speaks to the psychological database that is a part of the tale. I would like to quote here a poignant articulation of such a database in Manovich’s article

Other types of interactive interfaces make the paradigm even more explicit by presenting the user with an explicit menu of all available choices. In such interfaces, all of the categories are always available, just a mouse click away. The complete paradigm is present before the user, its elements neatly arranged in a menu. This is another example of how new media makes explicit the psychological processes involved in cultural communication. Other examples include the already discussed shift from creation to selection, which externalizes and codifies the database of cultural elements existing in the creator’s mind; as well as the very phenomena of interactive links…New media takes “interaction” literally, equating it with a strictly physical interaction between a user and a screen (by pressing a button), at the sake of psychological interaction. The psychological processes of filling-in, hypothesis forming, recall and identification – which are required for us to comprehend any text or image at all – are erroneously equated with an objectively existing structure of interactive links…Does new media similarly function to play out a particular psychological condition, something which can be called a database complex? In this respect, it is interesting that database imagination has accompanied computer art from its very beginning.

Hence, what is the relationship between this psychological database complex that Manovich is talking about with the procedural rhetoric that Bogost has highlighted in the function of persuasive games. Game engines can only function if there is a database to store that function. By creating persuasive games instead of serious games, are we then performing the traversal of function, the traversal of phantasy, where we reach into a higher ethical level than is possible through traditional modes? Are we closer to building this engine/database of ontology that has only been a series of abstract words and sketchy diagrams? Are we now revolutionizing the original conception of syntagm and paradigm by making them the signifier (or framework) by which we can now position our generative text and art? By making tangible the paradigmatic and syntagmatic what has only been a discursive construct of the lexical, can we now build a database of consciousness based on a clearer and thorough-going articulation of the ontological?

Maybe new media, and media art, has never been anything new or the province of the digital age. It’s ability to play a more discursive role is perhaps only accelerated by the existence of digital tools. But at the same time, it gives voice to pseudo-artists who has only scrapped slightly at the surface of the

envisioned by Aarseth and later Waldrip-Fruin.

And to end, I do agree with Harrison in his article Beyond Flash, that

I believe our medium – the online medium – has the potential to become the next great way of processing and expressing our world. Some would say it has already reached this point, but I believe it still inhabits an awkward adolescence, with no real virtuosos and no real masterpieces, and that the only way for it to mature is for its leaders and practitioners to push themselves to make better work, which will, in turn, reach a larger and less insular audience. If the work is purely technological, it will be less likely to reach this larger audience, for it won’t resonate with as many people. If it connects on a more human level, on the level of ideas, it stands a better chance of touching people deeply and spreading widely, like a Toni Morrison novel or a Steven Spielberg movie.

And that is the vision of my project, I have hinted on in this page, and which I will be blogging about after this. An intellectual idea that cannot change lives even at the most banal level is one that is stuck at the canal of its birth.

A reasonable question is if we can extend this result when we consider ergodic Banach spaces not necessarily having a Schauder basis. The only know example of Banach spaces with no basis is due to Enflo (Acta Mathematica,Volume 130, Number 1 / july de 1973, Pages 309-317) and it is a non familiar space at all (actually it is a hard construction).

This game then, focused on creating poetry on pressured circumstances, is best categorized as ergodic because of the required effort to participate in the full functionality of the game. Furthermore, because this game would never be able to be played in print text, another medium most be used to classify it. Based on these characteristics, this E-Lit work is, in my opinion, best suited as ergodic work.

First post. Coming up with clever ways to impress the blog readership with my first posts has grown tiring. Yes, “Posts” in plural because this is not my first, first post. It’s been quite a few times (one too many), in the past and have failed to maintain it over three posts. So hopefully, doing this with my sisters will help with some consistency. However, seeing that the only post so far has been from my virtually hyperactive (pun intended) little sister (no matter how in coherent and cute), I’m starting to have my doubts. In any case, here’s for a nother chance …

Fan!

From DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal
Chris Bertram and Lance Knobel acquire a taste for Daniel Davies:

Junius: Posted 12:24 PM by Chris Bertram: Smart, no, really smart blog
Thanks to Davos Newbies, I just came across D-Squared-Digest. Clever, sometimes rude, well-informed, left-wing, and author of brilliant explanations of the importance of Daniel Kahneman and Why are Americans so Fat? He makes it straight into the blogroll.

Me[DeLong]? I want to award Daniel Davies the Steven E. Landsberg award for idiocy in the application of neoclassical economic principles to everyday life for his post on Why are Americans so Fat? But I first need to consult the committee to determine whether intentional idiocy qualifies, or whether it is reserved for unintentional idiocy only.

Postscript – why not the “Gary Becker” award? (Chicago types, feel free to flame away…)