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Virtual Entity Alpha Minus Minus - CODENAME JAILBIRD - August 2009

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The festival Liwoli, happening in Linz between April 23rd and 25th, and named 'Hacklab for art and Open Source', was a great gathering of very interesting people. Among other things, including a very crazy performance that culminated with the total erasure of the system while making real time video with Pure Data (without back up and in a totally unsafe fashion), the Virtual Entity 'research software' was presented during the Friday evening session.

The first Imaginary Property intervention inspired a new thread of research. As we decided to implement a non-structured experiment, Ted Byfield, our guest, was invited to improvise on the topic of Imaginary Property following a very loose and open structure. His intervention revealed, by the end of the meeting, a powerful new approach to the topic. Ted started introducing himself following salient events of his own biography which could inject a reflection on our research; by the end of his speech, I could draw an unexpected connection on my note book: there are similarities between systems to define time, so to say calendars, and domain name systems.

We all use to be enthusiastic about this possibility of copying and copying and copying. So we all think the copy is just the same as the original. Maybe the copy is in fact the ‘original’, but how many originals are there?

Any copy of a file can be defined as an instance of the file entity. The main idea of Virtual Entity is that, any time a native file is created and uploaded to the Net, it is possible to initiate a Soul for this file. The Soul of a file, according to Ve's imaginary, is the combination of a set of Metadata plus editable space for information interchange, not very dissimilar from a wiki. Digital entities are subdivided is four main substances, that are Text, Audio, Video and Image. All entities are either natural born analogue or natural born digital.

Digital artificial world is structured by specific rules that are somewhat different from those expressed and manifested in the physical world we normally experience. One relevant difference is the definition of identity. Since every 'singularity' is reproducible in infinite number of identical copies, and there is no substantial difference between copy and original, because the copy of a copy is exactly the same as the copy of the original, the basic distinction between copy and original is not relevant, and digital identity is not unique.

Undermining the borders between text and image, between private property and public space through the design of 'imaginary' advertisements and (ironically) deconstructing some of the basic conventions of a magazine, Imaginary Property is curating the 77 issue of HTV-De-IJsberg, investigating new fields of image-production beyond the hard-coded notions of the commercial versus the editorial.

This is the second last day of the coding week, the prototype rush by Megabug and me, sponsored by the Design department of Jan van Eyck Academy (many thanks!). The sun is shining and we would really love some walking in the bush, since the whole landscape is white and silver, and the snow has covered the country.

Every second Wednesday of the month, at Goldsmiths college in New Cross, London, some people are meeting to discuss, around a table, different projects and researches concerning media art and related fields of inspection. On November 12th Gabriel Menotti presented a very interesting text entitled 'Computation as dynamic topography', part of his research at University of Sao Paulo. His approach is presenting computation as a specif process that cannot be described as simple text, because, in short, computation is a dynamic event happening inside a machine, thus it is not text in itself, and probably software should not be defined as text at all. On November 26th the project Virtual Entity will be presented and discussed. The door is open and any interested person is welcome to come in and participate, we are gathering at 18:00 at Whitehead Building, room 117.

During the presentation at Haip festival Virtual Entity's digital world division into four substances was put under question. Basically the whole lecture was divided in two segments: from a general presentation of the project and its current state, the focus went on substances as relevant categories, including relative problems and possible solutions to those. These four substances are, in the specific, Text, Audio, Video, and Image. These are somewhat echoing Aristotle's four elements constituting earth, and the celestial globe.
An interesting discussion started, here is a recording of the stream in mp3 or ogg.