[NetBehaviour] from correspondence with Ruth

[Alan Sondheim]

who asked me to put the following paragraph up,

I wrote

       I'd love to see a discussion about the body in relation to the
       network (for some reason keep thinking about Fidonet and its use
       of telephones and modems years ago), focused on the body, not on
       economic transfer. Maybe it's that "we" went through that in the
       60s in another way admittedly but with the same issues, and a
       lot of artists here find the gallery system / buying and selling
       / etc. really corrupt; there are returns to art practice /
       praxis (I saw a lot of this in Atlanta) that emphasized creating
       spaces in ruined buildings, etc.; even hacker spaces (a la
       Eyebeam at the time) could be integrated that way. I don't know
       how to bring all of this to Netbehaviour or whether it would be
       worthwhile. I love DIWO and work in this direction whenever I
       can (I'll be doing something at New Jersey Institute of
       Technology I think), but with the mocap/dancework I did, the
       body was central and amazing (Foofwa's 2 1/2 hours of
       preparation before he did anything recorded at all for example).
       Even with the Access Grid world circuitry, we were concerned
       with the appearance and stuttering of the body in the matrix,
       and so forth.

- and thinking what worries me, the double-pronged discussion of 
blockchain, getting a lot of copy from IBM, security firms, etc.; I wish - 
selfishly I think, that there were more balance between that discussion 
and the work done elsewhere, with bodies, with refugees, with dance, with 
languaging. I keep thinking on and off about Annie Abrahams' network work 
and for example Terry Crowley's Bislama Reference Grammar, Bislama being a 
language used as lingua franca stemming from Vanuatu, how these creole 
languages (that might not be the right world) develop interstitially, what 
can be done with them, how they might reflect class for example (I kept 
thinking about class with Annie's piece, separating the invited 
participants from the commentators on the side, by a vertical line), etc. 
So much to explore _between_ blockchain/network/DIWO and real life where 
the O of others might or might not be enclaved, invited, disinvited, 
completely inclusive, etc.; I think of DIWO/O in this regard for example.

I'd like to know more about the jellyfish work, about the ethics of 
biocoding, etc.

I'd like to more about people observing, about bodies, about their 
problematic relation to ai (even Foofwa is working now with a robotic 
dancer controlled by a number of computers; it looks like nothing human at 
all) -

About the references above, the main space that has interested me in 
Atlanta is Eyedrum, "ruined" isn't the right word here either. The Access 
Grid material should be accessible; we did that at West Virginia 
University years ago; I can give you urls if you want. I've also been 
participating in Tamara Lai's Proto Digital (I'm now an admin) which might 
be a good reference...

Apologies for meandering, Alan