[Dev] Reflections around substances after Haip

[xname]

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.

http://virtualentity.org/audio/Virtual_Entity_haip.mp3
http://virtualentity.org/audio/Virtual_Entity_haip.ogg

Some people argued that text is nothing else than a sub category of image,
because in fact any letter is a symbol, an a symbol is for sure an image.
Others declared anything to be open with vi (nerd text editor, lovely
application) is text. The problem of steganography came about as an
example of ambiguity. If I inject text data inside an image, what is the
substance of such image? If an image is representing a piece of text, lets
say the name 'xname', is this an image or a text? What is the Soul of such
digital entity, that is to say the picture of a name? And further, what
about the Midi protocol? Isn't this text to describe sound? If the basic
distinction between 'natural born analog' and 'natural born digital' was
commonly accepted, the 'assembly' stated the following: "not every single
file is to belong to a single substance", although it is true that the
entire digital world can be described as audio, video, text, image. This
division implies a certain approach from the technical back-end that was
basically triggering the whole philosophical discussion, although this
mean was not explicit for the most. The problem is, shall we ignore the
substances, while building the first Souls' pool, or shall we declare
these substances as concomitant possibilities? The right words to answer
this question came about tonight: all substances are immanent in Virtual
Entities. This is the basic conceptual achieve of my Haip experience
(other than this, I will not say). Thanks to all workshop participants and
many thanks to Megabug, who does not share my opinion on non randomizing
the approach to Metadata. The achievement, that was collectively generated
during an intense afternoon of a not yet cold Autumn in the South East,
appears at the end almost obvious: should an immaterial entity have a
single substance? Off course not. The substance depends (especially in
such cases) on the specific approach to content, rather than on a supposed
unique matter. More problems are arising, and I decided there must be a
limit to complexity to render this project actual: theory can lead until a
certain extent. The margin where theory dissipates practice, and ideas
become impossible to grasp, and elusive, and fragile such as leaves under
the wind of the same, now cold, season, this step towards dispersion, we
will not walk. And Virtual Entity stays a practical project, without
crossing the border addressing the void, but developing of theory an
actual demonstration, or zoo.



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