Mark Pesce
is an Internet visionary and the co-creator of VRML, which introduced 3D representations to the World Wide Web. He was recently appointed Chair of the Interactive Media Program at the USC School of Cinema-Television in Los Angeles. For his work on WebEarth, which creates a real-time VRML model of the planet, Pesce received an Honorable Mention from the Ars Electronica Foundation. Mr. Pesce has received numerous awards for his work in live virtual environments and is an author and lecturer on the subject. http://www.hyperreal.org/~mpesce/ Boundary Bath: Poetics and Information To imagine the term "information vs. meaning" is to take something whole and pronounce a divide within it, to cross a line between the measurable and the measurer. What we can know and what we can feel, these do not precisely add up; the path between them breaks, a non-linearity. One does not map onto the other. This is the mistake often made with language, translate you onto Sie and thou onto me, which, as Wittgenstein noticed, causes no end of pain. We don't even know what we're saying, though we know what we mean. So we speak from meaning but hear only information, and therein are we are split in two, with two minds and two selves. These two exist at all because something comes between them; but this something is the stuff of us, this carbon in chains which channels and, therefore, separates the without from the within. If this wall vanishes, if equilibrium? then nothing, less than nothing, naught at all, for caught up between them, real being, being's extension into the real, flesh and blood holds itself against, against, against the assault of every entropic second of existence. Everything else is but shadows. So shadows are all we have, only the shadows speak. The body is silent and the mind speaks for it; when the mind is silent the body speaks for it, in an Eschaton of mere anarchy loosed upon the world. If we fear the primitive for his primal rage, so we fear the body for its primal silence. Now the body speaks. We have put strong microphones before its tiny voices, and hear the infinite recursive flicker of wheels within wheels within wheels tracing down to an elemental gear-chain of adenine, guanine, thiamine, and cytosine. At the most fundamental layer, life becomes the meaningful arrangement of bits of information into uniquely successful forms. The engines of evolution continuously drive the definition of meaningful until they can express themselves in forms which can understand the continuous drive of the engines of evolution. At that point, the engines of evolution begin to drive the definition of information. This point has been made by Teilhard and others, though mostly ignored; even evolutionary biologists who study the antique transformation of forms ignore the contemporary transformation of forms with radical subtlety and simultaneity. The world has become suffused with information, even as it was always suffused with meaning; information evolves, within us, and especially between us, because in the passage from poetic to prosaic as much lost comes again, and again, and again. If all evolves, matter, meaning and information, then all, somehow, must be one thing, hidden and unique. But no one has found a name for this; we can not speak more of it. Of the things we speak, only one of us knows; of the things we speak, only one of us hears; between the hearing and the knowing comes the beating and the bleeding, the incomplete nature of forms. Words lie; every word lies. Only truth in one's self. Thus divided, and united, only poems tell the right little lies, about just the wrong things, to lead you away. If you let yourself be carried. See schedule. Photo by Steven Piasecki	program BILL BUXTON ANDY CAMERON MATTHEW CHALMERS DANIEL DÖGL BILL GAVER NEIL GERSHENFELD ANDREW GLASSNER PAUL HAEBERLI TOM HEWETT BREWSTER KAHLE PANU KORHONEN DOUG LENAT JO LERNOUT RALPH MERKLE THEODOR H. NELSON CELIA PEARCE MARK PESCE HANI RASHID BILL SCHILIT DAVID SMALL MARCO SUSANI JOHN THACKARA MICHAEL FREEDMAN TURNER WHITTED ANTON ZEILINGER
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