As TCR 2-50 contributor Jim Andrews writes in his essay The < body > of Net Art: “Works of software art always make use of services available not remotely over the net, but rather from the operating system of the local computer. These range from tapping the computer’s graphic display device to its input/output devices (such as the mouse and keyboard) to using the browser and/or installed plugins such as Shockwave or Flash or Quicktime, speech recognition software, or virus scanning. These respond more quickly than web services, typically, since the query and response do not have to travel over the net, and are common services required by the general user rather than being more specialized services available over the net. Also, local services generally do not draw on the world’s media stores but are relatively confined in what they can offer in terms of media and artful analysis. In any case, the local services are definitely a part of the net art < body > architecture. They offer swift response, a factor which is sometimes crucial in computer art, and customized use of all of the resources of a contemporary computer.”
In her 2007 book My Mother Was a Computer, N. Katherine Hayles examines the recursive relationships between computational services and our reading of texts. Although print texts are always, in a sense, coded, the big difference with electronic texts in that they have already been processed by multiple layers of code before a human reader decodes them. “Compiling,” Hayles notes, “is part of the complex web of processes, events, and interfaces that mediate between humans and machines.” In a chapter on Intermediation: Textuality and the Regime of Computation she writes:
Complex feedback loops connect humans and machines, old technologies and new, language and code, analog processes and digital fragmentations. Although these feedback lops evolve over time and thus have a historical trajectory that arcs from one point to another, it is important not to make the mistake of privileging any one point as the primary locus of attention, which can easily result in flattening complex interactions back into linear casual chains.
Indeed, as Jim Andrews goes on to say in The < body > of Net Art: “We see in things like Google Desktop, an application that extends Google’s search function to local files, how web services and local services can sometimes be merged in such a way as to make indistinguishable one’s own computer capabilities or storage capacity from those of remote computers on the net. Networks connect computers in ways that vastly increase the capabilities of each of the computers on the network and, concomitantly, the capabilities of the people using them. Since McLuhan, we have thought of technology as an extension of the body, the senses, and our cognitive processes, and that is true, in spades, of computer networks.”
Through the feedback loops in which electronic text recycles print and the programs generating electronic text recycle code, we glimpse the complex dynamics by which intermediation connects print and electronic text, language and code, “original” and translation, the specificities of particular instantiations and the endless novelty of recombinations. These dynamics open out into fundamental questions about the nature of texts, the relation of materiality to content, and the specificities of media.
N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer
Print technology created the public. Electronic technology created the mass. The public consists of separate individuals walking around with separate, fixed points of view. The new technology demands that we abandon the luxury of this posture, this fragmentary outlook.
Marshal McLuhan
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Frank T Vertosik wrote a book entitled: The Genius Within: Discovering the Intelligence of Every Living Thing
This is from the Library Journal review of it:
“To be alive, one must think.” A practicing neurosurgeon, Vertosick maintains that intelligence the ability to store experience and to use it to solve future problems is an emergent property of groups. Thus, bacteria, the immune system, and enzymes can be as smart as the human brain. All of these entities operate within networks that communicate and adapt to change in true Darwinian fashion. He further believes that this network paradigm of problem-solving originated at the cellular level.
I read this book, and reading the above text made me think of it. Because it puts an interesting spin on what you might call the phenomenology of networks, and because it of it’s idea that life is intelligence, which is it self and emergent property of groups (or networks)