[dev] Viral Monster

[xname]

>From 'Virtual Entity Journal':

Milan, February 1st 2010

When I think of Virtual Entity as a science fiction project, I imagine a
sort of noisy humus, or blinking plancton, as if matter - that is
immaterial matter, or information - would redistribute itself
continuously, and shiny bonds would connect particles of fragmented pieces
of predigested elements, forming the body of that monster whose unstable
structure is made of textual souls, and of the space around them. Virtual
Entity is, indeed, the formation of such processes of instantiation, and
of the linking of those uber-structures that are above the file-body. If
this is deeply connected to the mythical approach to this subject - the
myth of digital birth and digital creation, isn’t it anyhow hard to deny
that a creature, whose body is entirely made of pointers (to bodies which
are not present), is a monstrous creature?
Thus, jumping out of this dreamy dimension, it is necessary to admit that
the so called ‘viral archive’, the horizontal and uncontrollable one, is,
indeed, peculiar. First of all, this information, as I said in advance, is
not necessarily true, nor scientific or systematic; second, since we are
talking about an archive of metadata, and considering the fact this
database is not storing any copy of any file, because the software creates
an online soul from a local file, then the mythical monster, and the viral
archive (which are the same thing), are a meta-archive and a
pseudo-monster, a monster without soul whose body is a collection of
souls, and an archive of information which talks about information that is
not present.

What is this implying exactly, I don’t know (yet): if metadata becomes
‘data’, and if this ‘body’ of information loses its reference, where soul
and body become symbol of each other, but they never meet again, then,
starting from the ‘song’ and the ‘shape’ of the monster, and from its
suggestions, can we re-imagine digital world as new? If one day only souls
will be left, so that only descriptions and metadata remain, the entire
content of the internet, and the whole digital world, would become a
shadow, and, like an ancient inscription, its real form will effectively
become a matter of imagination.

http://virtualentity.org/journal