contact sponge	from notes produced by sponge in 1999 M3 Themes 01 02 m3 notes m3 is sponge’s project for the year 1999-2000. In a controlled experimental space like a gallery and later in a semi-public park built out of fusions of digital media and physical material, using continuous as well as discrete forms. The gallery version will play on fantasies of the puzzle and the garden. The semi-public park version will be a a place to replenish the spirit and a serve as a critically-inflected experiment embedding digital media in architectural built space. This project may be also carried out as a sequence of etudes which can stand alone, although they'll answer to the arc of themes we describe in this note. We're preparing a PowerPoint slide version of our proposal. sponge’s overall research program First, a reminder: sponge is a conversation dedicated to the construction of public experiments in phenomenology and desire. sponge's research program is a multivalent one -- aesthetic but also technological, political, philosophical -- to perturb worldviews from the current paradigm of object discrete finite representations rule-based action dualist ontology informatic to >>> fields (from which objects can be formed) fluid expression (anyone can form novel meaningful gestures) continuous action, continuous becoming a-linguistic sense-making Why? To make possible — Imaginary space in which people can imagine other than what actually exists; The means and the materials which people can actually make these imaginaries. The space of this imaginary is multivalent: not just aesthetic, but also physical, social and erotic, which is why sponge work cannot be “art work” nor “scientific work” nor “language work” but a fusion form of creative work. themes: 1/PLAY play in many guises, but the two main senses that we're using are game-play, and ontological play — how stuff deforms and slips around stuff. (See my e-mail from 9 Mar 1999.) rule-based play Discrete finite representations Game as a formalizable system: There is a State space of finite discrete representations, and Transitions s--> T(s) Combinatorial complexity that inevitably emerges from a modular approach which combines above free play What does this mean? Continuous ranges of options over a continuous phenomenal manifold? Social, group play emerges without explicit instruction or command. themes: 2/EXPERIENCE Emergent theater (script generated vs. immaterial). Dissolution of the body in the network. Reflexive abiity to shift from spectator to creator, inside-gallery to outside-park. Moving from such questions of spectator and actor to more immanent notion of performance as gesture immanent in ordinary life. This is based on the formation of experience and subjectivity out of the flow or interference of fields of media and matter. themes: 3/ONTOLOGY — LA STOFFA DEL MONDO system and its exterior: What is the paradox of a system? That there is always an outside to any system, that there are always exogenous variables. Is an “open system” an oxymoron? How can a society be a system — what are the rules? tangible media: The give and elasticity, plasticity of some forms of matter vs. crystallanity, brittleness and the interlocking rigidity of the gear-world. How can we give digital media such materialities, and how can we infuse computational media in matter.   phenomenal, experiential qualities: What do people experience in these rooms, or spaces? To answer this we should distinguish between the phenomenology, perception, and psychology. We can design in terms of the phenomenology — the experiential quality which is not the same as what you see or hear (media), and not the subjective psychology. We design keeping the phenomenal qualities in mind. We describe our pieces to curators using the perceptual (you see this color, that structure, you hear these sounds at this time...). And we design nothing of the "internal subjective experience," the psychological, of individual visitors. We do not expect to design phenomenological epiphanies but make states/environments in which such epiphanies are much more likely to appear. One such epiphany is the shift across the cusp between immersion and reflection, but there are many, marked for example by laughing in delight, an ambient erotic rush, a crystallization of a memory, a resolution or eruption of a pain. Puzzle Tight, boxed in Always know where you are, but can't get there from here Only small number of options at every juncture (sparse logic) Amusing, after awhile people should not be scared or frustrated anymore, but amused Sense always other people's presences Shower Snow-blindness Cleanses palate T(opological)-Garden Consolation Memory , recollection Anticipation Unearthing and burying bodies and other precious objects Contemplative work -- layering, digging, sifting, exposing depth Sense-making without language
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