The history of representation shows people to be highly aware of casting figures in a role. By and large though, that luxury was only afforded to members of certain classes÷and even then, it was usually mediated by and artist, painting or sculpting the portrait. When post-modernism revived this practice of representation, it did more than resurrect old representational practices; artists were no longer the mediated devices used to construct the identity. The onus was instead placed upon the individual.

Cybernetique = the art of governing. As such, the governance is between the navigation of knowledge and the mediation of said knowledge. Habitation is not created through corporeal forms, but a commorancy through subjective experience. Thereby a liquidity exists within knowledge space. Mutable inscribed architecture.

Within exploration, the screen is not the end, but a cultural attracter that strips authorial artifice away from the media it presents. The artificial importance of the media is reduced, as the role of the author is relegated to that of the attractor rather than the creator. Formative practice is inverted, where the representation is the summation of events toward the construction of media rather than the media itself. The process of creation is itself subject to reforming alternative representations. The media is intrinsically the message. The simulacra is not an option based on authorial manipulation and audience expectations, but inherent based on the artifact formed out of the summation of formative manipulations.

Along these lines, feedback loops and emergence from them forms the basis of the constructed environment. The artist tries to construct an environment, but creates a loop of implied action and causal chains from the recursion. It is, essentially, the exploration of possibilities. The art of the work in progress, of the infrastructure.

As the art is no longer the summation of processes, but the process itself, the art is also derived from the implication of form rather than the form. It is art derived by what could happen. Within this, the inframince, the imperceptably thin space between things is formed by deriving the before and after of participatory experience. Its the space between subjectivity and implied observation along the causal chain toward formative discourse. The imperceptible qualities and quantities of mediation.

Taking this concept of the inframince and post-modernism toward a new architecture for a conceived and reified cyberspace, we are left with the use of information exchange as a construction mechanism. The signs and the signifiers -- semiotics -- as the most powerful construction medium. As such, the technology is linked to humanism, in that the derivation of structure is created by emergent participatory behavior. The world is semiotics, where the signified is the content and the signifier the people. A pure form/function dichotomy, or in other words, an embodied aesthetic, meaning an aesthetic formed by the discursive practices of the participants.

Murmurs.com is a tool for the exploration of the way users construct environments of communication, and the way in which the mediators of this communication in turn effect the communication created. The feedback between mediation and the mediated creates inherent form based on the enabling infrastructureâs interference. The tools used for representation dictate the emergent forms here, and in turn that representation affects the forms and is hence fed back into the system. This consistent looping creates artifacts of mediation, artifacts forming identity, roles, represented ãselfä and in turn, these artifacts too act as chains within a larger network of causal implication. This loops of implied action, inscribed reaction and the transmutation of both into a causally informed and cyclic representational foundation is in the end, the artwork.

This is a network of causal implication, reaction and emergent behavior based on causality form a concept of an actor network, leading toward Actor Network Theory which examines the relationship between a network of actants. Actants consist not only of users (literally actors within a stage) but also the systems that enable communication: threads, posts, etc. Essentially, actants are objects, which interact to form a causal chain leading toward action. The actor network is the infrastructure created by the play between actants, and the network is thus defined primarily by its desire to balance itself.

While actor networks form the over-arcing system based network, users too have networks centric to themselves. These networks are derived not out of actor networks (although the formed networks themselves are an actant), but instead out of implicit relations between people: social networks. Within Murmurs, the site will use multiple layers of social networks in order to create a network representation for the user. Different weights will be applied to different links based on their explicit or implicit derivation. Explicit derivation from buddy lists, implicit derivation from things such as posting habits and if a user applied the current user to their buddy list.

The unification of these two network forms will make liberal use of the ãisovistä concept from Michael Benedikt. Isovism is the quantification of perceptual awareness central to a user into a five dimensional representation. With this isovistic treatment, we can take the topology formed out of the actor and social networks and yield it spatial dimension and distance based on the most efficient and desirable isovistic construction for a user.

As networks are further explored, it becomes evident that the dendriformal model that is imposed on Murmursâ reified space currently is not sufficient in terms of fractional dimension analysis. Thus, a switch to a rhizome based network infrastructure is necessary. Rhizomes are of course a concept from Deleuze and Guattariâs ãA Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schzophrenia.ä In a terse summation, rhizomes are structures that exist without a root, objects without a hierarchy and without a ãGeneral.ä Multiple ingress and egress points exist, and there exists no center to a given rhizomatic network.

PROJECTS

Agents of the Free

Murmurs.com

OTHER REFERENCES

Semiotics for Beginners

Jean Baudrillard

Bruno Latour

More on Isovists (PDF)

Fractal Theory

Monadology