<nettime> The Paris games, a positive wood-dragon crisis to set experience free

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

+++


"thorny ideological and personal issues no longer make such challenges so hard to manage"

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/xi-jinping-russia-lessons-putin

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/green-peace-climate-change-geopolitics


+++


...[Because] we aren't autocratic enough, is what some foreign-raised tech bros love to say, is why we have to spruce every new feature – it's not new technology anymore and hasn't been for some time, it's new features – but the true need is to keep the IT sector attractive to young ambitious workers and gamblers (with occasional guardrails and bailouts of course).  It's somewhat a case of polishing a turd, because you can't make human decency and wisdom and happiness nor civic virtue in a factory.  Very quotidian and mundane, indeed almost apologetic, have the whingeing redux tech hypes become as we all can see blatantly well.  They sell you a cheap fake you to make you more efficient, more valuable, and maybe it's even alive!  What?

Furthermore, the strategy and imagery of saving High Civilization by lots of war is equally tired, so conservatives -- those who wish to favor the private sector with favors rather than the public sector as progressives do -- have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for rhetorical enthusiasm, and the barrel is almost out of scrapings which puts the system at some risk of real regress.  How much risk there is cannot be calculated with simple certainty.

Still, to stay calm, as we must, in that carrying on is our mandate, we ought not necessarily equate certain present-day goings-on with the insanity of 1933.  We are closer to the idiocy of 1924.  Still, you get some bad luck, plus ignorance, like 1929, and pretty soon you're in 1933 before you can say Bob's your uncle.  Then you get, well, as we all know all too well, 1939.

That's why ideas like ExperienceDemocracy2024.org are essential and everyone concerned for politics should check them out.  It shows the original 1788 typography of Hamilton's bookends to the great case in favor of constitutions, a full year or so before the Bastille got stormed, which has EXPERIENCE twice in all bold caps for its closing paragraph and demonstrates this early-media usage's parallels to Blake and Dewey.  That's enough dots to get to two dimensions and easily amenable to the adding of any variety of fourth dots to get to three and fifth to four.

But people don't check stuff out unless it finds a very lucky state of being both unusual and prevalent, accessible and helpful.  It takes a village so to say to be a village.

How can we get experience and experiment, the deep learning (past, present, and future tenses included, both noun and verb) of human and biological systems, onto people's informational palates fine?  This question has plagued many, from Socrates and the Buddha to John Keats, Emily Dickinson, and more recently Olga Tokarczuk, whose fabulous 2022 essay "Ognosia" references a medieval print by somebody (Paracelsus?) of someone looking into the deeper life of things as if under a tablecloth, which, I found to my surprise yesterday, is also on the cover of Boorstin's 1983 bestselling tome "The Discoverers" which was lent to me by a parent and only superficially mentions Leonardo.  Which says something!

Back to politics: it's a game, a war with wooden swords, at its best, as the founding framers hoped.  The game is a multi-format presentation of possible imagined future communities followed by scorekeeping and a vote count.  One image, made up of visual and verbal elements along with many other bodily functions, excrement and vomit sometimes or just mucus and a little plasma, wins.  That's the game.  Both sides agree to play once and have a rematch later gosh willing.

The play's the thing – the imagination, the cavorting, the "gioco" in Italian, the theater of the polis at the base (not the peak) of the Acropolis – in which we catch the conscience of the king.  We image it out.  Some kinglets like this better than others but none like it all that much because they prefer paeans to talking.  Sometimes groups have the can-do-itiveness for a republic, if they can keep it, but not always.

The Olympic games relate to the Acropolis: the biggest grandest games on the calendar in the history of calendars.  The Olympics is where even the deities of money, fine timepieces, cologne, ornate togas, tasty food, fun toys, and leisurecrafts overlook the proceedings.  The fastest runners and the fiercest grapplers, swiftest swimmers and best basketball players, hash out who's who.  All compete under their flag of birth unless banned for doping.

This year's games for 2024 are in Paris.  The Mona Lisa, La Gioconda, is therefore one of the presiding principal abstractions, the very incarnation in oil paint of human experience in its plain and simple majesty (if we pay heed, as Yeats and Proust did and we should, to Pater).  How often humans forget this being!  Yet now it has its pride of place under the pyramid at the center of it all, from which every ladder and stairway ascends, its identity unmistakable.  We know who is watching this time.  It will catch the conscience of the king, this observer of all observers and coscienza of every scienza, la joconde consciente.

By listening, as all history and prehistory prove, we help speech to happen; and therefore we must say the words – some of us anyway, without rancor or foodfights, with malice toward none – "son nom est Expérience" and "Je m'appelle Esperienza (La Joconde)" – in that great viewing hall at least once or twice, during the games.  They can be on a t-shirt, politely spoken aloud, or whispered.  Even silent ASL consisting of a pointing human finger and the sign for experience which together take just a second will work just fine.

Then, to resonate and circulate the nutrient we have all the other means and ways that information flows.  No need to list them now, but the website ExperienceDemocracy2024.org has the key original screen captures from Hamilton's first and last Federalist Papers to show why art and science imaging like the ML relate to democracy.  They can even tip the scales of an election if enough young people directly or indirectly get the gist and decide not to stay home in futile protest; and though the evil Machiavellian Claudius might still win, because you never know, in which case we'd have even more hustle to get to in order to keep the republic a republic and might not succeed, we still may try our best to help the other, better, lesser evil and necessary compromise – life always is a compromise – to prevail.

Of course such a gioco comes with no guarantee.  If it works, it's because someone thought it up and staged it and someone else, at least one, watched it play out.  Sometimes just these two are enough to get the message across.  The particular qualities of the year also pertain, such as the wood dragon year 2024, to whether anything in particular is detected.

Then there is also the upcoming next film of Ken Burns.  It's about his first non-US subject matter i.e. Leonardo da Vinci.  It does not premiere until mid-November, after said electoral situation will have been resolved (most likely) not to mention the Olympic medals awarded, but you can read the press release online at PBS dot org.  (Notice how "Disciple of Experience" is the title and key concept of the first half of the film and much else too.)  In this fabric one can easily see how the ASL sign for Esperienza might actually mean something to younger voters who don't see why they should lift a finger as it were for a moderate.  More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than from any other source.

Conservative LLM-jockeys will certainly be gaming away like mad to depress these young people for pay, gaslighting their rapidly developing souls into a kind of intellectual and emotional coma; so who is there to joust nobly with the AI/GPT's and their flood-tide of greasy, smeary, oily, yea unctuous piles of imagery verbal and visual?

I'd say – obviously – that a certain painting is ready to throw down with those machines.

And win.




Max Herman
ExperienceDemocracy2024.org

The Mindful Mona Lisa at Leonardo.info/blog
Free art experiment at seethebridge.org
Commedia Leonardi Vici trilogy PDF free online at:
pibinko.org/max-herman-works/


Ken Burns Leonardo film press release:
https://www.pbs.org/about/about-pbs/blogs/news/leonardo-da-vinci-a-new-film-from-ken-burns-to-air-on-pbs-november-18-and-19-2024/



+++






-- 
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org