Wetwares

This is by no means the end of my post.  I just decided that it would be prudent to put what I have as soon as I have access to internet.  So here it is:

2: knowledge is of course crucial, but so too is an aptitude for panic.

3: bits of language…rhetorical softwares, unpredictable algorithms of textual hazard whose results were subject to change

4: seduction involves a summoning of alterity, the cultivation of a familiar.  “Relax,” this algorithm of the familiar reads, “it’s just a machine.”

5: tools vs weapons

7: forgetting

8: familiars

9: Alife: lycanthropy for networks. Artificial life disturbs, continually rendering the border between life and nonlife, flesh and machine, seductively uncertain.

9: panic

10: the bumper sticker for such an inhuman politics reads: Provoke swarms, forget coalitions.

11: subtractions and repetitions

12: holes sprout in what had been experiences as wholes.

13: inside/outside; viewer/viewed; animal/human

14: flattening of the self into a line.

15: The event of observation is less a passive reception than an incessant exposure to a swarm, a hospitality to the multiple “parts” of an object.

17: chaosmosis: a welcoming neither foreseen nor preconceived

I’ll admit that this chapter made pretty much made no sense to me.  I get that this is the introduction, presenting important terms, but I don’t really get the presentation.

 

19: “artificial life,” simulacra that are not simply models of life but are in fact instances of it.

20: living systems as distributed events.  living systems are in this view understood as unfolding processes whose most compressed descriptions are to be found in the events themselves.

21: life is just an interesting configuration of information.

21: It’s a creepy doubling of something no longer appears: “Life.” “Life,” as a scientific object, has been stealthed, rendered indiscernible by our installed systems of representation.

Not much yet; it’s coming.  I promise.

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